Green oak is cheap and eager. It will let you build fast, and then it will spend a decade telling the house what it thinks of you — checks across the beam, doors that stick every October, a frame that settles into opinions. We buy trees, cut them to dimension, sticker the boards and let the yard do the slow half of the work.
Twenty-six months is not a superstition; it is a moisture number. When the meter reads what the house will read, the timber goes on the lorry. Not before. Clients sometimes ask what they are paying for while their oak sleeps in our yard. They are paying for the ten years of silence afterwards.