The Working House

Richard Krouse is in a bad mood. He should be raising his timber frame home today, but a steady rain is soaking his plans.

The plans are everything. The plans are invitations to 50 friends who are willing and able to pound pegs and lift bents (the pre-assembled sections of a timber frame). The plans are corn-on-the-cob, potatoes, cold cuts, beer kegs, a crane with operator at 80 bucks an hour, weeks of design, timber selection, complicated mortise cuts, reservations, phone calls … weatherman says a storm will hit on Saturday.

“It can’t. I won’t let it happen,” Richard might have said on Thursday and Friday, and Richard is a man who is used to pushing around tons of solid oak frame. “The storm will veer off.”

On the phone Friday night, Toni, Richard’s wife, says they’re going through with it anyway. The weight of that many plans won’t stop rollin’.

We arrive for the 7 a.m. Saturday start at 11 a.m., or so, and see that one bent out of five has been raised, but the predicted rain is pouring down and the site is deserted. We find the soaked crew in another of Richard’s homes on the adjacent lot.

Wet jeans are draped from pegs to dry, and friends are drinking beer and coffee and making roast beef sandwiches, while a pack of little kids charges around like this is the greatest party in all their six long years.

We corner Richard.

“The beams are too slippery today. We’ll put it up tomorrow,” he says simply.

And he does. The complete frame, including the little pine bough at the peak (giving thanks to the tree spirit for another strong frame), went up the next day and, where once there was a hole in the ground, there now stands the frame of a two-story home. It’s all in the planning.

Let’s get this straight; if it’s economy and efficiency you’re looking for, then skip the timber frame. A house can be built with stress skin panels alone. They are self supporting: no studs; no headers; no carrying beams. Glue ’em together and punch out openings for the windows and doors.

You’ve probably seen stress skin panels; they look like a sandwich of marshmallow fluff and graham crackers, but are actually OSB (oriented strand board) and foam (either polyurethane or expanded polystyrene) and often include a finish layer of 1/2-inch sheet rock or V-groove pine. Although Amos Winter is given credit for the first use of stress skin panels in residential construction in 1973, there is historical precedent.

Mr. Winter borrowed the panel idea from the walk-in freezer industry. Even further back, Hansel and Gretel witnessed the fact that witches were making houses with gingerbread panels. It just goes to show you, there’s nothing new in the industry except the names.

Please don’t misunderstand us. For their thermal insulation, load bearing and spanning capabilities, and ease and quickness of assembly, we think stress skin panels are the greatest thing since sliced bread.

The same day we witnessed the completion of the timber frame house we watched a stress skin panel home being easily raised by Dale Hedquist and his crew of three (North American Panel, Westmoreland, N.H.) on another site in Kennebunk. When it’s finished, this will be the quietest, warmest, tightest home on the block.

You also can build a “hybrid,” which marries ancient and modern building technologies into a high-tech stress skin home with artful timber frame accents.

This summer, you can mix learning with a beach vacation at timber frame workshops in Kennebunkport:

July 9-20, Wood Lily Workshop will offer hands on timber framing instruction for men and women. The two-week session costs $400. Contact: Wood Lily Workshop, RR2, Box 976, Kennebunkport, Maine, 04046 (282-7176).

September, 1990, Richard Krouse is planning a rain free barn-raising workshop. Contact: Richard A. Krouse/Builder, RR#1, Box 2020, Arundel, Maine, 04046 (967-2747).

Doug and Cynthia Edmunds are renovators from Kittery.