Hands-on house raising

St. Johns couple looks to past to build home that stands test of time

By Joseph Gallivan

LocalNewsDaily.com, Nov 14, 2006, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (2 Reader comments)

L.E. BASKOW / LocalNewsDaily.com

The centuries-old method of building a timber frame house gets newly applied in St. Johns. The home’s owners found the building plan online and the wood at Oregon Timberworks, on North Mississippi Avenue.

It’s a sunny October morning and local television development company Distant Planet is filming a segment for a green building series pilot to be called “The Natural House.” The crew is up in the rafters of the home Josh and Megan Prewitt are building in St. Johns.

Producer Ed Eberle puts host Pam Mahon through her paces, making her repeat “Stay tuned, there’s more coming up on ‘The Natural House’!” over and over with different intonations.

“A lot of big companies are recognizing that the sustainable and green building movement is coming up from behind in the last year,” says Eberle, referring to his pursuit of potential sponsors, which include Home Depot and Lowe’s.

He’s received some interest from Ford Motor Co. (it has a hybrid out), and if the stars align he would shoot 13 episodes of “The Natural Home” in the southern U.S. this winter, followed by 13 more in the northern states next summer.

The Prewitts’ house is a convenient backdrop for the pilot, which also visits some usual suspects: Tom Kelly, president of Neil Kelly building company, gives a tour of his family’s new vacation home in Parkdale. (The home just received the first residential LEED, or Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, Silver certification on the West Coast.)

“If you’re building a vacation home you’re already not building sustainably,” adds Eberle, referring to the fact that the land would normally lie empty. “But this is going to be more than that; it’s open to employees to use.”

Sustainable is the buzzword of the building trade and the media.

“The show’s about the people. They have the same vision, looking at houses sustainably not only for the materials but for the heart and soul, too,” Eberle says. “They’re interested in buildings with a soft footprint that will last generations. They’re building for a family not to flip it in a year.”

Eberle says builders have even stopped by out of curiosity and ended up working on the Prewitts’ house, just because it’s so different.

“To build with your hands on this timber, and have your friends and grandmother’s hands on that timber,” he says, “it imbues it with something we’ve lost touch with.”

When the Prewitts decided they wanted to build a new home a few blocks from their current place in St. Johns, they went natural. They chose to craft a timber frame house, using techniques that date back centuries.

In the West, most timber frame houses are made from Douglas fir 80 to 120 years old and held together with 1-inch-diameter wooden pegs, made from black locust wood. It’s all very low-tech. Steel bolts stick into the upright beams, attaching them to the concrete foundation by steel, while hurricane straps also help hold the frame down.

“It’s a glorified piece of furniture,” says Bill Sturm of Oregon Timberworks, a North Mississippi Avenue neighborhood company that mills wood and designs and installs such houses all over the West. “It’s all laid out and takes a day to put the whole thing up.”

According to Sturm, not only does the basic shape resemble a barn, but the assembly was comparable to a communal barn raising: “The owners brought lots of friends and family, there was a great spread of food, people were dropping by all day to help.”

The owners also are planning on putting in an outdoor kitchen with a cob oven and fireplace for summer parties and barbecues.

Home could travel, too

Gesturing to neighboring houses on North John Street, Sturm stresses what makes his preferred style of building sustainable. “Timber frame is going to last a lot longer than this stick frame stuff,” he says. The expression is as cheap and nasty as what it describes. “It’s also called balloon framing, it’s just done by nailing two-by-fours together.”

And if the neighborhood is ever redeveloped, Sturm’s pretty sure no one is going to bulldoze a timber frame house. “You can just pull the pegs out and reuse it,” he says. Reuse, in this sense, doesn’t just mean the lumber for another project. It means rebuild the same house in another place.

Part of Sturm’s inspiration to build natural homes came in architecture school when he spent a year in Europe. He realized timber framing was not interrupted by the Industrial Revolution, and that the skills were still being passed down in Germany and France as well as in Japan.

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