Waltner Wood & Wall Designs

Custom Furniture & Faux Finishing

You have to be blind not to know that our world is going green.  These days, no matter your political party, the environment is a hot topic.  Businesses are scrambling to figure out how to market themselves to the public as eco-friendly.

   At Waltner Wood & Wall Designs, we’ve been quietly plugging along in our own little eco-friendly world since we opened six years ago. 

 

The philosophy behind our eco-friendship:  It really all starts as an outgrowth of our faith and subsequent world-view.  Our Mennonite faith teaches, among many other things, that God made us stewards of his planet, and we are responsible to take care of it for future     generations. 

     Although we didn’t really think of this at the time we opened our business, we’ve come to see that this underlying philosophy relates quite closely to the services we’ve chosen to provide.  Jerome wants to build and sell quality furniture that will hold up over generations, trying in his own small way to combat the disposable nature of our current society.  Now, when we talk about how we can save people money over constantly replacing furniture with another piece of inferior quality, we also talk about how much less landfill you will create if you don’t have to throw your furniture away every 5-10 years. 

     Keri has also come to view her vocation, faux finishing, as the ultimate in recycling.  When you create something new out of your walls, floors, kitchen cabinets or tile backsplashes by adding a coat of paint or texture, rather than tearing out outdated materials and color schemes and starting from scratch, you’re doing something good for the environment.

 

The technicalities of  our eco-friendship:  From the beginning, we’ve been committed to using eco-friendly products in our work.  Unlike many furniture makers who insist on using oil-based stains and varnishes because they think it produces a superior finish, we have spent lots of time and money perfecting our water-based finishing processes.  We think you’ll agree that they are as appealing as oil-based finishes (and they won’t yellow over time like oil-based finishes do).  On the faux finishing side of the business, we also use low-VOC, low odor products.  As the painting industry has come out with more and more green products, we’ve begun using paints like Sherwin Williams’ Harmony and Benjamin Moore’s new Aura (Greenguard certified). 

     In addition to paints, stains and varnishes that are green, we also use, whenever possible, woods like Lyptus®, a sustainable wood grown by Weyerhauser on plantations in Brazil.  Growing this unique eucalyptus hybrid reduces clear-cutting of forests and after harvesting, the trees re-grow from the stump in many fewer years than it takes to grow a new tree.

     We’ve also done a few other things to assist the environment.  To reduce paper waste, we converted our bi-monthly newsletter over to a 99% e-mail version four years ago.   Three years ago, we moved our family in to live above our shop, hoping to reduce the energy needed to heat and cool both a workplace and a living space.  We have been successful in that endeavor.  Two years ago, we also bought a new business vehicle, a Chevy truck, that features FlexFuel technology.  This means it can run off of regular gasoline or E-85 (ethanol).  Unfortunately, so far the gas stations that carry E-85 are few and far between, but that is changing.

          We’ve looked at the various commercial certifications, like Greenguard and Smartwood.  Unfortunately, the high cost of these programs, both in terms of becoming certified and maintaining records doesn’t make it feasible for our small business at this time.

    However, we recognize that “going green” is not a completed process for us, and we continue to look for ways to be good stewards of the planet God has given us.   ¨

Going Green?  What we’ve been doing...