Timber Framing Continues

I've spent the last few days waking up early and helping out my mountain-dwelling friends with the construction of their timber frame house. We're a small crew and the timbers are heavy (some around 650 pounds), so the days can be exhausting. It is, however, truly an amazing process.

Basically, the house that we are constructing is made up of three "bents". A bent is, if you can imagine it, like a movie set facade left naked--pure timbers making the skeleton of the front (or rear, or middle) of the house. See an example of a nearly completed bent (this is the back of the house) below. Unfortunately, the frame is so large that it was impossible for me to take a photo of the whole thing, but one gets the point:



Now, after constructing this bent (again, the one you see above is the frame for the back of the house) using only timbers (connected by joints and wooden pegs), we moved on to the next bent--that which will be in the middle of the house. We constructed this bent directly on top of the first one, and then moved on to the front bent, also constructed directly on top of the others.

As you can imagine, by the time we were done with the three bents, it was an interesting process moving around the "deck" (what will eventually be the floor of the house). In order to do so, we had to leap high timbers and avoid tightly pulled "come-alongs" (a hand winch).

It has been a good time--days of hammer swinging and heavy lifting, drilling and pegging, malleting and pulling. It has also been a time of laughter, cussing, and grunting in a very manly fashion. For the other guys, it was a time of well-deserved smoke breaks (I did not treat myself to this particular part of the experience) between hours of hard work.

Tomorrow the crane will arrive at 7:30 am, at which point the truly crowd-pleasing part of the process will begin to take place. Using the crane, we will lift up each of the bents, one-by-one, and place them in pre-carved slots in the deck. They will be anchored with straps, come-alongs and cables. At this point, the house will look like three skeleton facades lined up in a row.

At some point after all of this, some people (I don't know yet if I am one of the chosen few) will ascend with harnesses to continue in the construction process, this time from very, very high in the air. It should be interesting.

More soon, with more pictures.