When Julie built her ranch style home in Oregon back in 1989, she wanted a classic timber frame, but was unable to find anyone in the area building timber homes at the time. With a background in the construction industry and woodworking, she was her own general contractor on the home and got as close as she could to the timber frame aesthetic by including exposed beams and wood pillars.
“We are retired now, but what we did for a profession was excavation and heavy equipment rental, site work, a lot of high-end homes, municipality, public excavation work, like high schools, streets,” Julie told us. “Funny enough, we helped develop the neighborhood we live in about 35 years ago. We built our family home here, and at that time I wanted to do a timber frame structure, but no one in the area was doing them. What we have in the main house is open beam and wood pillars, which is as close as I could get to timber framing in 1989.”
More recently when Julie began considering retirement, she reached out to New Energy Works to design and build a timber frame addition to her much-loved family home. The reverent timber space that now houses her at home woodshop is designed to be a flexible space that can adapt to her fine woodworking needs today but could also be converted to functional living space in the decades to come.
“When we decided to retire, we didn’t want to move, we like our house, but we wanted to build something to facilitate our retirement. Instead of moving into a retirement community with a woodshop and a gym, we thought “why not just build it?”,” Julie explained. “So, we did. This will be my third woodworking shop, so I knew exactly what I wanted going it, and it turned out spectacular.”
“The building should be warm, well-crafted, and express the fantastic qualities of wood. It should be simple, with clean lines, and lots of light, to balance functionality with beauty. These were the goals of the project, developed after meeting with the client, an experienced woodworker. I feel the finished design embodies the spirit of the client’s own work and I was pleased with the space we created.” - David Shirley AIA, NCARB
“This is actually the smallest woodshop I have had at about 900 sf which made me really think about downsizing my tools, what I needed, what I could get rid of. I decided not to put in ducting for a dust collection system, thinking that perhaps one day this won’t be a woodshop.” Julie said. “When the property changes hands someday, this is still a great room that could be used for any number of different purposes. It is a wonderful, big, beautiful room, it can be used for anything.”
Designed by architect David Shirley AIA, NCARB from our inhouse west coast team, the woodshop features a large timberframe main space and several outdoor porch areas, the addition also utilized our high-performance enclosure system which we call HPEz, or High-Performance Made Easier ™.
“A high-performance enclosure is a wall system that is fabricated far above code-minimum construction standards in terms of insulation, airtightness, reduction of thermal bridging, and overall quality. This results in a structure that can offer increased indoor comfort & air quality and reduced energy consumption/costs.” – Bryan Bleier New Energy Works HPEz team lead.
“One of the things that we are really liking about the building is how well insulated the space is. The efficiency of the addition was a concern of ours, but it has turned out that it is more of a tight building that I anticipated it to be” Julie mused. “The guys that worked on it were so concerned about poking holes in the walls, so we tried very hard to put as few holes in the wall as possible for things like venting. Every single vent had a huge conversation associated with it. We are very pleased with how well the enclosure worked out.”
“I love the people from New Energy Works who came to work on the woodshop, they were a lot of fun. They worked hard; they really did. I think there were a lot of younger timberwrights on the job, and it was training by fire on this project, but they did a good job,” Julie surmised. “Without exception people walk into this woodshop and say: “Oh my god.” And they look up, and the look out the windows, and the turn around. They just have no words to describe it. We have heard “you could hold church services in here!” It is a spectacular new part of our home. I am going to be very happy with it the rest of my life, I am sure.”
Project Credits:
Engineer: Eclipse Engineering, P.C.
Reclaimed Wood: Pioneer Millworks
High Performance Enclosure: New Energy Works
See our case study:
The Woodshop | New Energy Works
Learn more about inhouse design department:
Learn more about HPEz:
