Marc and I were 20-some-feet in the air sitting on the principle rafters of two adjacent bents, setting a ridge beam as it was gently lowered into our hands from the nearby crane. “Well,” Marc said with a sly smile, “here we are again.” Marc and I have been setting ridge beams for 30 years together. This one was in Sisters, Oregon just a couple of weeks back. The sun that day was a merciful 96ºF (given that the day before had beat the 100ºF mark) and we were heading towards the end of a reasonable long crane day. 

I still do raisings. But I’ll also admit that at 66 I find myself a bit more tired at the end than perhaps I used to be. Why is it that I’m still “riding the ridge” so many years later? Why is it that Marc, still more fit than 80% of Americans half his age (I kid you not), is willing to fly out from his home in North Carolina to help us out?  The answers aren’t all too tough a riddle: we love raisings. As Marc said at the end of that particular day, “I feel such a sense of accomplishment.” It’s mostly that simple. It’s also the reason why our raising team is made up primarily of the same folks who cut and finished the frame in the shop. That sense of accomplishment, of bringing one’s work to completion, with a bonus scoop of circular learning.

Our HPEz (High Performance Made Easier™) team has been busy in the past year crafting and installing enclosure systems for numerous projects throughout the country. In addition to designing our own High-Performance enclosure systems, on select projects we offer off-site manufacture of panelization systems as a subcontractor.

One of those projects is a Pre-Certified Passive House near Philadelphia PA where our team partnered with Holzraum System to manufacture and install their Holzraum XP20 Wall Systems on a home designed by architect Macht Architecture and built by Hanson Fine Homebuilding. Our team also installed the floor and roof system on site as well, focusing on the intricate panel joining process to ensure the home meets Passive House thermal envelope standards.

“Holzraum System came to us with this project, they did the 3D computer model configurations of the enclosure and other components. Once they had it in architectural drawings, we helped them break it into panel sections for manufacturing in our HPEz shop,” Kevin Gilbert, Construction Superintendent from our team told us.

DiBella’s Old Fashions Subs is a chain of sandwich shops on the East Coast that traces its roots back to 1918. Founded near our Farmington NY campus in the nearby town of Henrietta, the chain now operates over 40 locations in five states.

Their flagship Italian Market store is still located in the town of Henrietta and our fine woodworking division NEWwoodworks recently built a series of heavy timber craftsmen style tables, butcher block counters, and booth tabletops for the shop out of reclaimed Heart Pine timbers provided by our sister company Pioneer Millworks.

“This was one of the first jobs I worked on when I started working for NEWwoodworks. Putting these tables together and being part of the entire process was really meaningful to me. I had never done any kind of large woodworking joinery before and leaning about how to do that was really rewarding,” shared Shawn, a new member of our fine woodworking division who worked on the project.