Timber Home Living recently featured one of our West Coast timber frame homes in their April 2016 edition. To accommodate their revolving list of family and friends, Bill and Dianna dreamed of a cozy guest cottage near their home on Yosemite’s Merced River. According to the homeowners, the dark-stained Douglas fir beams woven throughout the home’s design “absolutely make the house”.

Read their take on the project below.

The Building Materials Reuse Association (BMRA) has announced that (our very own) Jonathan Orpin of New Energy Works and Pioneer Millworks will be featured as the keynote speaker for the Decon ’16 conference in Raleigh, North Carolina. Orpin will launch the conference on February 29th with a forward-thinking address titled “Everything is Possible. Stories of de-constructible buildings, recycled wood, and companies that can thrive doing so.”

Decon ’16 is the premier international conference on building deconstruction, materials reuse, and C&D recycling and this forward-looking address will seed the future of a world without waste. “Jonathan’s experience and remarkable portfolio of projects will be an inspiration as the conference opens, and sets the bar high for all of us in the circular economy of materials,” shared Anne Nicklin, Executive Director of the BMRA.

After three years, the biennial conference of the Building Materials Reuse Association will return, serving as an international gathering of practitioners using both knowledge and experience to create a world without waste. The conference will be hosted by Habitat for Humanity of Wake County and NC State University February 29th through March 4th, 2016.

“I am equal parts thrilled and anxious to be speaking at Decon ’16, as this group has led the way for a long time in this exceptional field. Let’s keep turning up the dial, from understanding the story and source of our materials, to using them for really great and beautiful projects, to creating sustainable business models and partnerships to get the good work done,” shared Orpin.

This week, our beetle was in Great Falls, VA assisting in raising a residential timber frame car barn. The 100′ x 60′ glulam king post structure will have a SIP roof enclosure with some beams that stretch over 64′. The material is Douglas fir glulams, conventionally kiln dried to create 60′ open span trusses. So far, there have been six purlin assemblies and the first four bents are erected.

Our West Coast timber frame champion Mike informed us that the starter bent truss weighed over 11,000 pounds and it was lifted without any struggle. It was “a thing of beauty”.

The architects of this project are Anderson Cooper Group Architects and Ehlert Bryan. The builder is BOWA Builders, Inc.