In this section, we anticipate your questions and explain what a timber frame is and how we construct one that is both beautiful and strong.

1. What is a timber frame?

   A timber frame is the skeleton of a structure that is fashioned with large timbers connected by a wooden joint. The joinery typically uses mortises and tenons secured with a peg or trunail or dovetails that lock together. Timber framing lends itself to open floor plans, cathedral ceilings, and solar glazing. It can also create an old-fashioned feeling. The warmth of the wood, the strength of the structure, and the craftsmanship of the joinery combine to make a dramatic statement for your one-of-a-kind home.

2. What do our frames include?

   Standard features include engineered and stamped plans, dovetails on all joists and purlins, housed floor joists, windbraces in the roof, rafters fully mortised to the posts, and curved braces.

3. What techniques do we use to make the timber frame?

   All of our frames are cut to your specifications. We use power saws and mortisers to cut our joints. All joints are finished with hand-held chisels and mallets. Timbers are "joined" and then planed and chamfered. Some of the tools we use are the same as those used hundreds of years ago.

4. What kinds of wood do we use for the frame?

   Usually oak, Douglas fir, and pine although we have also used cherry, southern yellow pine, cypress, maple, beech and chestnut.

5. What about frame erection?

   Raising a frame is dramatic. Most people have heard of community barn raisings, which depend on the brute strength of many people to raise the frame. Today, we preconnect most of the frame on the subfloor of the new building and lift large sections into place using a crane. We then fit the "bents" together with connecting timbers and sturdy oak pegs.

6. Where do we put the insulation in a timber frame building?

   We use stress skin panels, which are a foam sandwich panel that gets applied to the exterior of the frame. Frame members are spaced to accommodate the panels in the roof system so there are no seams. This provides an extremely tight structure that is inexpensive to heat or cool. The panels provide exterior sheathing for clapboards or shingles and blueboard on the interior for plaster and paint. For complete information on these insulated panels, including their benefits, features, and installation, please visit Foard Panel's site at foardpanel.com.

   Uninsulated barn frames have horizontal side wall purlins to nail ship lap pine boards to.

   Our buildings can be certified for all special energy-conserving home programs in North America, such as the Energy-Crafted Home Program in Massachusetts.

7. How do we come up with the designs?

   Combine your ideas and dreams with our knowledge and experience. The result: a building design that will be uniquely yours. We won't try to push you into a standard model, but we will work with you to create the building that suits your site, your taste, and your needs.

   The inherent flexibility of the framing system allows you maximum freedom in opening up spaces vertically and horizontally. Cathedral ceilings and open floor plans are easily included. Imagine yourself inside breathtaking rooms and cozy corners, then let us make them reality.

   Turn here to our new section on designing a barn to suit your particular requirements.

8. What have we designed and built?

   We have constructed buildings of all sizes, shapes, and styles: capes, saltboxes, gambrels, colonial and contemporary houses as well as barns, greenhouses, stores, restaurants, pool enclosures, art studios, and even lock gates and a highway bridge.

9. How much does it cost? Is it more expensive than stick frame buildings?

   Our prices are competitive. Our house will cost slightly more than a conventionally built house. But if you ask the conventional builder to add some beams for aesthetic reasons and also ask that builder to deliver an extremely tight shell (R25 walls and R33 roof) with virtually no perm rate through the structure, it will cost substantially more for that structure than it will for ours.

10. Where do we build?

    We can build anywhere! We have built numerous houses in Arizona and we have a booth in a show room in Japan. Our product is quite portable once the frame is fabricated in our shop. Trucking costs are part of any building project and paying ours allows you to build your custom house wherever you desire.