Borax Bath

The original idea was to simply paint the columns with borax dissolved in water, and we did this a few months ago with our lintels which (compared to untreated wood on site) still look brand new and mold free. This was until we learned that the neighbour had am 8m long half-barrel trough that he made for treating his own beams a few years ago. So a team of us headed across the fields to fetch it.

We soaked all of our wood in a mix of 15kg Borax, 10kg Boric Acid and 200l water, heated to around steaming temperature. We crammed as much wood into the trough as possible, and any wood that wasn’t underwater was rotated each day to ensure all wood had its time submerged. We also took the opportunity to scrub mold off the wood that had already grown.