Our timber frame house.

[littlewiz88]

My wife and I have been working on planning and getting ready for our upcoming timber frame home for about the last year. I have decided I want to try and document some of it as I have really enjoyed reading other members builds. While we won't be building the frame we will be helping out and doing much of the other work ourselves. We are a young couple with decent jobs and a good budget but highly motivated to do what it takes to get what we want without spending a small fortune. We have been working with a local one-man timber framer since last April designing a frame and modifying our floor plan to work with this style of building. So far we have learned A LOT. Up until now we have been doing our best to get accurate quotes and shopping sales like crazy so that we can stay close to our budget. We have found a couple of places in the Twin Cities (Minneapolis/ St. Paul) area that have mainly overstock/discontinued/special order returns that have been invaluable for saving money. As long as you're willing to do some digging and know what you want and need there is substantial savings to be had. It is a 160 mile round trip but we just combine a trip by going when we will be heading up to see her parents anyways.
About our design:
26' x 36'. Four bents with three bays. Shed dormer on both sides of the roof in the center bay only. One for the master bathroom and another to get some high windows to let light in out of the south for the dark winter months. The frame will be a mixture of white oak (due to strength needs) and rough sawn white pine.








The center T-posts are similar to how a lot of barns around here are built, these will be an oak post with two 8ft long oak timbers (8" high by 3 ¾" thick) sandwiching a piece of ½" hotroll steel. This was done not only for a little extra strength but also for looks.



Full basement (unfinished), main floor, and loft with master bedroom and bathroom.  We are using polyurethane SIPs panels for the roof and walls which we have just ordered about a week ago. The timber framer is working on the timbers as we speak and we are hoping for a mid-June raising.




The floor plan has had a few slight tweaks to what is shown here and our kitchen island is missing in action on the print.



We bought a parcel of land from my parents last year (lower left corner of the picture) along the Root River. My parents own the rest of the peninsula shown so we are lucky to have about a mile of river frontage. We currently rent their cabin shown in the photo so we are building real close to home. Last fall we started to clear our building site and got a driveway roughed in.















Lots of tree cutting and brush piles as it was like a jungle in there, not a lot of sunlight getting to the ground. Mostly hardwoods around here, Oak, walnut, maple. Saved a lot of oak for fire wood in the wood stove and some of the bigger logs to saw up on a friend's woodmizer. Continued clean up this spring and currently waiting for the rain to subside for more than a few days before we start digging the basement, which better come soon as the basement panels are scheduled for the 19th of May.

[Brian_Weekley]

Looks like a fun project--it's going to be a lot of work!  One question for you--why are those canted posts attached to the rafter connected to the bottom of the queen posts instead of going directly to the beam?  Just seems like that would be stronger.

[littlewiz88]

Here are a few more pics I forgot to put up yesterday, we don't have internet at home so I had to wait until work today. I had the draftsman at work do some drawings of what the outside will look like when done.



The brackets for the gable end overhangs and the front and side porches:


The gable end brackets are made mostly from white oak cribbing from our house moving business.

Looks like a fun project--it's going to be a lot of work!  One question for you--why are those canted posts attached to the rafter connected to the bottom of the queen posts instead of going directly to the beam?  Just seems like that would be stronger.

I honestly couldn't tell you since I'm not a timber frame designer, but I trust Phil (the man building the frame) to know what he's doing. My guess is it is because of the timber beams running length-ways through the house connecting the bents, seems like it would become a very complex joint to build.


Before someone asks, the reason for the odd timber joists spacing going on at the right end of the house is because we changed the way we are going to build the loft floor a few weeks ago so we needed to add another set of joists in the last bay. The section with only two joists had already been cut and it is just a closet anyways so there shouldn't be any issues doing it that way. I take the blame for that, not the timber framer.
Once we get through this project and I'm hoping to study timber framing a lot more and build a frame of my own, possibly a combination woodshed/covered dog kennel for our coonhounds. I would love to understand frame  At 28, I just can't afford to quite my job to do it and with my wife wanting a home of our own I can't spend a couple of years doing it. The weather is starting to look good though so I am hopefully going to push some dirt around when I get home from work tonight!

[fishfighter]

It looks like you off to a good start. Keep us in the loop. ;D

[Ljohnsaw]

Interesting saw horses.  The blue ones.  Are those metal with a wood insert to keep the beams from being marked up?

[fishfighter]

They look metal to me.

[littlewiz88]

Yes, they are built out of steel tubes. My family owns a manufacturing business so we just built them out of scrap laying around. Those are just  plain old 2x4s ripped to the right width sitting in the channel iron to keep the timbers from getting beat up too bad. Not too heavy but plenty strong for what we need and since 3 points make a plain they don't rock back and forth like a 4 legged model.

[littlewiz88]

Last week we started digging our basement after work, then finished it up Friday and got footings ready over the weekend. We dug in rock the whole time it seemed, mostly slabs of limestone/sand stone 6" thick, 4-6 feet long, and 3 feet deep. It was a lot of work with a mini-hoe but we got it done. Ended up borrowing a hydra-hammer from a friend for our skid loader to chisel our way into the limestone for the walkout frost footing.






Chuck and our other hound love all the dirt, sand, and mud to play in around the work site.

We are using a Superior Wall pre-cast basement, it sits on a crushed rock footing similar to a wood basement would.

We own a man-sized diesel powered tamper, that thing is a beast but does a heck of a job. I think it weighs 400lbs.

A little premix oil in the primer, then wind up the starter rope, give it a yank and I think it will shake the core of the earth.
The superior wall was attractive for us since it goes up quick, is pre-insulated, and ready to finish on the inside. And the price wasn't too bad either. We were supposed to set our basement tomorrow (friday) but its been raining since Monday. Yesterday we had several extreme down pours which ran into the basement. The walk-out frost footing had 2 feet of water in it when I got home from work yesterday, the wife and I spent an hour and a half trenching to try and get water to drain and keep from washing things out any worse. We finished up right as the next thunderstorm came over the hill, I didn't have time to check on it this morning but I'm hoping all the trenching did it's job.



We were smart enough to put landscape fabric over our footings before we quit Sunday so hopefully we can scrape the mud off the top and very little mud and silt made its way through.

[littlewiz88]

Wow, hard to believe it's been well over a year since I started this thread and I haven't done any updating. A lot has happened since the last time I posted some pics and we've been too busy to think about it. I'm proud to say that we moved in this past June and just have some trim work to finish up. Everyone said it would be a lot of work and it was, but it was definitely rewarding as heck to be able to say we did much of the work ourselves.  The only things we haven't done ourselves were the HVAC, most of the plumbing, sheet rock taping, and concrete work. If we keep on track I should be able to finish up before I turn 30 in a month and a half 8). Not too long after the last pics I posted we got our basement put in and the slab poured. The hardest part of the basement was getting the truck in the driveway to offload it. Between a somewhat tight driveway, a rookie truck driver, and an OTR truck with a full sleeper (normally they send a vocational style truck) it took us almost as long to get him in there than it did to set the basement, which only took about 3 hours.

 


 

 

 
Once that was in we got the basement waterproofed, slab poured, and backfilled fairly quickly. The main floor deck was on and the basement framed out by July 4^th but our timberframe was not done as he was struggling with a lot of crooked timbers.


In the meantime we built a temporary roof over our basement to keep the weather from damaging what was already done. All in all it stood up fairly well. We spent the rest of the summer building retaining walls and sanding and finishing timbers as Phil got done with them along with collecting items we would need once we really got started. It took much longer than expected but when it was all done it fit together beautifully and was perfectly straight. Amazing work if you ask me.  Fast forward a couple of months and we finally were able to start putting up our frame in October. First to go up was the center T post assemblies and the connecting oak beams that ran between them.


  

 

 

 

 

 
We used our man-lift to set these as it was rated for 1000lb lift capacity. It didn't take long to realize we wouldn't be putting the whole frame up with this though. Luckily for my wife and I my dad and his business partner are the git-r-dun types and they bought a used crane out of Ohio for cheap, as in for about the same price it would have cost us to hire a crane to sit there while we put up the frame and sip panels, maybe less. Dad bought it Saturday night, partner Jim drove to Ohio and slept in his suburban Sunday night, paid for it Monday, and it showed up at 8am on Wednesday morning on a lowboy.

 
I should note that this mainly happened because dad will need a crane to build his own house (which he recently started on). We are very grateful to have people like this in our lives for without them we wouldn't have had the resources or capital to finish this project. We got the whole frame up other than the rafters within the next few days before my wife and I had to attend a trade show in Omaha for 4 days during which time the timberframer Phil worked on straightening and cutting joints on the outside oak rafters.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


Once everyone was home from the show we set the rest of the rafters and put up our tongue and groove ceiling.

 

 
Next we started sheet rocking one wall at a time and set a whole wall of panels at a time as we finished the sheetrock. This worked great as then we didn't have to space the panels out from the frame and try to slide rock between the two later on. I did spend extra money on fiberglass faced sheetrock that is much more weatherproof than paper faced stuff.

[FalconFan]

That looks great!

[Ljohnsaw]

Impressive! 8)

Inside shots next?

[littlewiz88]

We got all the roof and wall panels on before thanksgiving along with getting our electrical service in and started laying sleepers and plywood over the roof sips to create our vented roof assembly.

 
The furnace was hooked up temporarily to get some heat going in the basement. Chimney assembly and Steel shingles were next.

 

 
The last of the shingles went up on Christmas Eve.  Inside we had things pretty much framed out within a day or two so the plumbers could get going while we started roughing in our electrical and getting ready for sheetrock. We bought ourselves a nice Kuma woodstove for Christmas as our only present to each other and boy was it worth it! 

 

 

 
Great craftsmanship and nice to sit around a woodstove in our new house. We had one in the house we lived in before we built this one and used it every day during fall and winter.

 

 
Finally in March we said to heck with it and took a week off and went to Montana skiing. The sheet rockers were going to town anyways so there wasn't much for us to do and we hadn't taken a single day/ night off from our project since we came back from our trade show in the middle of October.

 

 

 
It was a much needed break but felt good to get home and start tearing into our project again. Once the sheetrock was done we spent the next week taping off the timbers and primed and painted the whole house. We installed our custom homemade staircase and butcher-block treads on Easter.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
I cut the wood for the treads out of 2x material alternating Fir and Pine. Dad built a fixture at work and glued up everything. It took two gallons of glue but boy do they look nice. We ran them through a planer then cut them down to size and finished them with 4 coats of waterlox. After putting them up we wrapped them in cardboard to protect them from dirt, etc. It sure was nice to not have to use a ladder anymore though! Next on the agenda was tiling, we got a quick lesson from dad on what to do and borrowed a real tile saw from some good friends of ours. Alyssa and I laid 600 square feet of tile between the kitchen, baths, laundry, and entry ways. 


 

 

 

 

 
I also tiled a tub surround and backsplash for the kitchen, boy were those learning experiences. Ill tile the whole floor of the house before I do another tub surround I think. Once we got the tile floors in we had our cabinets and vanities installed, the man who built them lives just down the river from us and does top notch work at prices that are comparable to buying something semi-custom from the local Menards store. 


 

 

 

 

 

 

 
We chose hickory for the color contrast and durability of the wood. They turned out beautifully. We installed the sinks and countertops ourselves. We started working on finishing our electrical and just had our final electrical inspection a few days ago.


 

 

 

 
We laid the pine 2x6 T&G for the master bedroom and loft and again finished that with waterlox.


  

 
Once the weather got nice we went to town on the Siding and exterior door and window trim.


 

 

 

 


We finished up Memorial Day weekend in 100 degree and humid weather. It was dang hot out but felt good to cross that off of our list. At this point it was almost June and we got our A/C hooked up and decided it was time to move in. We spent a week finishing our master closet with some leftover T&G ceiling wood and started hanging a few doors, finished her pantry (the most important room in the house for her) and started to make some of the custom trim for certain spots. We finished soffit and fascia and also built two porch frames and put some tigerwood decking on them. The color contrast is just great in my mind and looks really nice. We used 80 year old fir T&G to finish the porch ceilings.

 

 

 

 

 

[littlewiz88]

Sorry about all the sideways pictures, they upload that way for some reason and I'm not sure how to change them. I will have to take some up to date inside pictures tonight as I haven't taken any lately. Hopefully I can put some up tomorrow.

[Raider Bill]

Outstanding!
It's a great feeling building your own house!!!!!

[thecfarm]

Use to be able to rotate the pictures in your gallery. Just bring up the picture and should be there.
Is that a round saw up in the eves??

[scouter Joe]

Nice project . Beautiful results . Thanks for taking us along for the ride . scouter Joe

[littlewiz88]

It is a saw blade, although not a real one. I looked around all our junk and could only come up with some 28" blades which just wasn't big enough. So being in the fabricating business I drew some up and had them laser cut out at a 60" diameter. I also had the year laser cut into them.


 


 

 

[littlewiz88]

 We laid 500 square feet of southern yellow pine flooring a few weeks ago then my wife finished that while I went and set up equipment at a truss plant in Orlando at the end of August. When I got home we hung the rest of the interior doors and worked on our railings. I built the posts out of 6x6 fir and the railings are something we created in the weld shop out of flat stock and rebar. A planed 2x4 coated with varnish finishes off the top.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


 


Last week we got things ready to pour deck footings and a couple aprons/ sidewalk next to our porches and on Friday afternoon we got everything poured.


 

 Next up on the agenda is get our patio poured which will be under our future deck and finish off the interior trim work. A little landscaping around the outside and we should be finally able to call it done.

[samandothers]

Great looking home!  Thanks for your time to share and please continue.

Really like the looks of the hickory cabinetry and the contrasting grain colors.  The rolling doors look very nice.

How was the Waterlox to put down? How many coats?

[Weekend_Sawyer]

Great looking build!!

What thickness are the SIPs?
and what are your cabinet doors made out of?

I really like your stairs.

Jon

[littlewiz88]

The waterlox so far has been nice to work with, 4 coats on the pine floors is what was recommended and what we stuck to. The only complaint I could have is the 24 hours between coats they recommend. Seemed excessive in my book as most of the time it was completely dry in a few hours.

Our wall sips are 4" polyurethane sips and the roof is 6-1/2" from Thermocore of Missouri. They have thicker panels but so far I can't complain about a lack of insulation. Even when its -15 outside its still nice and toasty inside, especially with the woodstove. Our cabinet doors are made out of solid hickory, the cabinet maker started with rough sawn 1x boards and whittled them into something spectacular.

I really like your stairs.

Thanks! We were going for something a little different than what you see in the typical timberframe.

[Wisconsintimber]

Wow, top notch job there!  I've always been a fan of timber frame structures and your home looks great!

[TimFromNB]

Wow, congrats, that is looking amazing!

[samandothers]

@littlewiz88 I looked back over some of the post, well most all of it and have some additional questions.

What wood was used on the interior and exterior ceiling decking/tongue and groove?  White pine?

What did you use to finish the ceiling and the frame?

[littlewiz88]

@littlewiz88 I looked back over some of the post, well most all of it and have some additional questions.

What wood was used on the interior and exterior ceiling decking/tongue and groove?  White pine?

What did you use to finish the ceiling and the frame?

The interior T&G ceiling is Ponderosa pine that we bought from a local shop that specializes in finish materials, e.g. trim, tongue and groove, doors, etc. They prefinished it with a clear lacquer, it came out to about a $1 a square foot after they finished it. Couldn't beat that in my book. The exterior porches have 80 year old doug fir tongue and groove that my dad salvaged from an old construction building 30 years ago. We ran it through the planer to clean it up and finished it with Rymar Xtreme Clear outdoor finish. Sold at Sherwinn-Williams paint stores. If you don't mind a matte finish, it looks REALLY nice in my book. We used some of their cedar colored finish on our exterior oak and while I wasn't sold on the looks of that it has grown on me. On the frame we simply used Dark Tongue oil from the Milk Paint company. My wife wanted something a little darker than a regular tongue oil and doesn't care for the honey color that many finishes give. Personally if I had to do it over I would use something like the Heritage product as I feel it would be easier to clean and give some more protection. But, I am happy with the looks for sure.