Timber frames clearly have their place. Looking back, that Vermont frame felt right not just because of its intrinsic beauty and the inspiring spaces it traced, it somehow managed to reflect the character and quality of the place where it was built. It felt like it grew there on those wooded slopes, that it belonged, less obviously imposed by human will.
Over the years my ardor for timber-frame buildings cooled a bit as I came to recognize that all that exposed structure had more to do with beauty than function, where the insulated skin that clad the frame was in fact capable of holding the roof up, but my love of the aesthetic and my appreciation for a well-crafted frame remained.
That we would have a timber frame in this house was an early design decision, which unlike many others I never went back to reconsider. My experience in Vermont had shown that a frame could echo everything I loved about the site - the trees, the river, the change of the seasons, the need for protection from the elements. Along the way Alison quite rightly raised the issue of cost and “is it really necessary”, but I knew that more than any other aspect of the design the frame would define the house so I fumbled through my awkward explanation but stuck to my guns.
Deciding who to get to do the frame was easy. Andy Cobus had built a traditional mortice and tenon timber frame for a project we did in Korea a couple of years back and had done an outstanding job. No CAD software or numerically controlled milling equipment for Andy, just graph paper, sharp chisels and an uncanny ability to visualize complex joints in three dimensions. Andy and his business partner Tim run a small shop with only two or three employees which means that their output is limited, so as with George I began the conversation many months ahead of time.One of the first decisions to make was what species of wood to use. From a sustainability perspective it made sense to use pine, our watershed being one of the pre-eminent pine growing regions of the world. I struggled with that one because I’m not a big fan of pine, far preferring the colour, grain and more refined appearance of Douglas Fir which only grows on the west coast many thousands of kilometers - and tons of transport carbon - away. I also ended up with some spans that would have been hard to engineer in pine, it being much weaker than Douglas Fir. In the end the aesthetic and engineering concerns trumped the environmental ones, something I’m not proud to admit because it exposes an obvious contradiction to my stated green building objectives.
Now that I’ve brought it up... in case you haven’t noticed there are many other such contradictions in this project, one of the most glaring is that I’m building on a two acre, pristine natural site down the end of a long dirt road that demands a fairly lengthy car ride to pick up milk. It could be argued that if I were truly committed I would be building on an urban in-fill site with existing infrastructure, within a stone’s throw of a bus stop. Add to that, I’m using some patently non-renewable and energy intensive materials - concrete and foam insulation for example. Some of these choices are easier to rationalize than others, such as the foam insulation that will conserve many times more energy in the 100+ year life of the house than it took to manufacture and transport it to my site. Are there less energy and resource intensive insulations I could have used to achieve the same result? There are, but all of them give rise to other costs and complications that in my decision-making matrix ultimately outweighed their environmental benefits. Building on a remote natural site is harder to justify, but given that I was bound and determined to do so it made sense to build the most energy conserving house I could possibly afford. Moving on...
The original schedule had Andy erecting the timber frame in early July so he wanted the timbers on hand in April to minimize his stress. With all the work we’ve done in Japan over the years (lets not talk about the environmental implications of shipping houses to Japan...) I’ve developed a network of suppliers in Vancouver including a source for timbers who was prepared to personally select the ones for my house, so when the truck finally arrived in Andy’s yard I was keen to see what he’d picked. Even Andy was impressed with what showed up, and with that concern out of the way we got down to the business of confirming dimensions and fine-tuning details of the frame.
I visited Andy and Tim’s shop a couple of times in the intervening weeks (months actually) to see how things were progressing. It was a bit like those visits to the doctor, staring at the ultrasound screen to see how the baby was coming along. We even pinned photos of the developing frame to the fridge just like we did before the kids were born (I doubt that my wife will appreciate this comparison) so by the time the slab was finally poured and we were ready for the frame to show up excitement (at least mine) was at a fevered pitch.
Back to the slab for a minute. When we last left the site all of the sub-slab prep was done - plumbing drains in, electrical conduit, poly membrane, 4” of foam, radiant tubing, the whole bit. I had a promise from Adbro - the guys who were pouring the slab - that they would be ready to show up on a Wednesday. On Tuesday the weather forecast was for rain the following day so we put the pour off till Thursday. Thursday morning I called Adbro to learn that they had nobody available to pour the slab that day - a real problem because Andy was set to bring the timbers to site on Friday, set them on the slab and begin to erect Saturday (you got all that?). When I heard the bad news from Adbro Thursday morning I decided to become the King of England, demanding that they put off whatever else they were planning to do that day and get my damn slab poured. This technique works surprising well in the construction industry - mind you, like the boy who cried wolf you don’t want to make a habit of it - and lo and behold the lads showed up.
The plan all along was for Adbro to use a pump to place the concrete. Of course with their sudden schedule change there was no pump available so they arrived with three guys and a wheel barrow. The guys looked at all the radiant tubing they would have to push their wheel barrow over and decided it would be best to put down some OSB sheathing to avoid crushing the pipe - a thoughtful gesture. We had a pile of scrap OSB nearby so they began to toss it up onto the floor at which point George yelled out to be careful because some of the pieces had nails in them. With the words barely out of his mouth, a spikey sheet of OSB landed on the floor and punctured one of the radiant lines, producing a heart-stopping hissing sound as the pressurized tubing gave up its charge of air. As luck would have it our plumber was working on a site about twenty minutes away so he quickly dropped what he was doing, raced over and replaced the now quiet line. All tubes were then re-pressurized and the business of pouring the slab resumed - whew! There was no other drama - other than the concrete truck driver spearing his shovel into the wet concrete, narrowly missing another radiant line - no drama that is until it was time to do the final troweling of the slab.
The slab crew disappeared after the concrete was placed and leveled, the crew boss promising to return in two hours, “once the concrete has set”, to do the final finishing. Three and a half hours later it was now dark, the temperature dropping steadily, and still no finisher. All I could think of was that he’s been in an accident or he stopped at the bar and I’m going to end up with the slab from hell.
Around 8:00 p.m., after making numerous unanswered phone calls, with the temperature now unseasonably close to zero deg. C, feeling faint from stress and a lack of food, I raced home for a bite to eat. By the time I returned 45 minutes later, hallelujah, the guy was there busy troweling the slab as his shivering girlfriend (can you believe) held one of those articulated desk lamps for him to see by - quite the scene. I blessed him for returning, surprising him with the earnestness of my thanks, then raced back into Arnprior to get to Canadian Tire before they closed so I could purchase some proper floodlights. The pimply kid at Canadian Tire, stunned by the speed of the sale, watched in bewilderment as I grabbed the lights, my change, spun on my heel and raced back out into the dark from whence I’d come, the sound of screeching tires giving him one final jolt. Back on site, with the slab now lit up like a football stadium, my blood pressure slowly returned to normal. After some chit-chat with the still shivering girlfriend about the quality of life with her nocturnal slab-troweling boyfriend I slunk back home for a restless night’s sleep, resigned to deal with whatever slab the morning light would reveal.
As things turned out the slab was pretty good - not perfect - but better than I expected. Andy, Tim and the lads arrived as promised around 11:00 a.m. and began spreading out the heavy timbers on the newly minted surface. We had originally planned to have Adbro back out to cut control joints but I put them off to the following week so as not to interfere with the erection of the frame. It was a perfect sunny fall day, ideal for sorting timbers, doing the layout and the final cutting of post heights. As I watched them work, the weeks of drudgery - the foundation, well & septic, and other seemingly two dimensional aspects of the job - gave way to the promise of seeing the three dimensional form of the building finally revealed.
During the brief spell between the completion of the sub-slab work and the arrival of the timbers on site George and Jesse had managed to frame the second floor of the garage. This provided the ideal vantage point to watch the timber raising, so it was with great anticipation that we climbed up to that floor, lawn chairs and coffee mugs in hand to witness the arrival of the crane and start of the festivities that sunny Saturday morning.
What a day! With a steady stream of observers joining us on our perch Andy, Tim, George, Jesse and the rest of the crew went about the business of fitting, pegging and hoisting the various members into place. I’d purchased a digital still camera with a time-lapse feature that took pictures every three minutes and set it up in an attempt to capture the process. In the morning’s excitement I failed to set it up properly and realized to my deep disappointment around lunch time that the damn thing wasn’t working. I quickly re-read that section of the manual and managed to capture the second half of the day.
By eight o’clock that evening the lads were in the garage drinking beer and sharing the satisfaction that only comes from a hard day’s work where everything went well. The fruits of that particular days labour came in the form of a beautiful timber structure - a magnificent testament to skill and craftsmanship. As the frame went up there were many references made to a traditional barn raising and while I’ve never had the pleasure, I doubt there could be any greater sense of camaraderie and good will than we all shared that day.
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