Set on acreage in Nacogdoches County, this home is surrounded by forest. The
exterior features both wood and limestone. The roof is conventional asphalt
shingles. Porches not only provide shelter for guests as they wait to enter the
home but also shade windows and doors and add extra living space.
Upon entering the house you will see an expansive timber frame crafted from kiln
dried southern yellow pine. The trees from which the timbers were made were
harvested from family land. Yellow pine is an extremely strong timber and
is excellent for timber framing. One further advantage is that it can be kiln
dried very easily. The use of dry timber in a frame will greatly reduce or
eliminate the shrinkage and distortion that plague frames crafted from green wood.
A sweeping curved stairway leads off to the second floor.
Beyond the stairs you enter the great room, which features ceilings that reach as
high as 32’ above the floor. The finish material on the ceilings is 1x8 pine
tongue and groove boards milled from the same logs the timber frame was. The
material was kiln dried and planed at our shop. With our two planers we can
mill material as small as 1”x1” or as large as 16”x20”.
To one side of the great room is a limestone fireplace. On the far side of
this fireplace is a second fireplace in the master bedroom. The flue for this
second fireplace runs beside the flue for the great room fireplace inside the same
limestone chimney.
Adjacent to the great room is the kitchen, which opens into it. The cabinets
are made of cherry while the countertops are granite.
Upstairs you will find some very interesting timberwork. Two different sets
of arches both provide support for the roof but also architectural interest.
The smaller set of curved timbers visible above the door at the end of the walkway
is mostly decorative and cut from a single large piece of wood.
The much larger complete arches are fabricated from several pieces of timber each.
If you look very closely you might be able to see that each half of each arch was
cut from three pieces of timber joined at angles approximating the arch by the use
of scarf joints. After joining, the three pieces were bandsawn to create the
graceful arches you see. The arches are part of an assembly that supports
a large beam, which in turn supports the king post trusses, which form the roof
planes. This is a relatively sophisticated method for transferring the roof
load to the posts, which in turn transfer the load to the foundation. This
is also a non-traditional method of timber framing.
There are five ways we use to create curved timbers. The first is to cut an
arch from a large single piece of wood. The second is to join several pieces
of wood at angles so that an arch can be cut from the assembly. A third is
to go out in the woods and find a curved tree. This is good plan when you
are interested in a more organic form and only need a single arch since it’s hard
to find many trees curved the same way. A fourth way is to cut thin pieces
of wood and glue them to each other on a form, which holds them until the glue sets.
Once the glue is dry a curved timber is lifted off the mold. The last way
is to steam a timber to make the fibers more flexible so that the timber can then
be bent.
Each method of creating a curved timber has plusses and minuses. The decision
as to what method is best in a particular case must be made by balancing the positives
and negatives against the desired end result. No one method is best in all
situations.
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