I received this personal note from an email friend that follows my blog. I thought you would enjoy her take on redwood as a building material!

“After reading your blog about the Redwood Forests and the the facts that you sited about Redwood being resistant to insects and fire, I decided to tell you our experience with redwood.

The summer before we got married, we started renovating an old cottage on a lake which had belonged to Mart’s parents. We got married in October and continued to work on it until the winter.

When we quit we had installed redwood siding on the house, then decided to wait until the following Spring to cut into the siding to install the windows, etc..

We left for the Bahamas for the Winter. In January we were called and told that a house 2 doors away had caught fire burned to the ground and because of the high winds had caught the house next door on fire and it burned to the ground. When we later spoke to the fire chief he told us that the only reason that our house, the next one in line, did not burn was that it was redwood siding and that we did not have any window ledges for the fire to catch on to – Thank God for our choice of redwood.

The only issue we have is that it is not impervious to WOODPECKERS!  They peck holes in it regularly.

Regards,
Connie”

Thanks, Connie, for sharing your story!  Real live experience makes for fun reading!  🙂