Library builder

From the plan, we know that the posts should be six feet (1.8 meters) long. With the eight-by-ten girders on top of them, this gives six foot ten inches of clearance to the underside of the rafters at the lowest point. And it is seven foot eight inches to the ceiling, so there is a […]

Once the floor was complete, I transposed the plans onto the deck with a black marker, at full scale. Now the position of every post could be seen clearly on the deck, and 1 could even show how the major south wall girders could abut with each other over the posts. See Fig. 5.22. I […]

We decided on two-by-six V-jointed tongue-and-groove spruce planking for our floor. The V-jointed side goes down, making an attractive ceiling as seen from the room below. We like it for its strength, appearance, and ease of installation. We also like the benefit of doing the floor and ceiling below in one operation, a real plus […]

A header is a short transverse wooden member used to provide support for an otherwise unsupported joist or rafter. An example is when a roof rafter needs to be cut to make way for a skylight; a header spans between the adjacent rafters to frame the skylight. The floor joist system for our new room […]

Former Earthwood student Doug Kerr visited for a week to help out on the early stages of the project. He wanted to learn timber framing, but didn’t want to wait for the book. Doug arrived in the evening, and the next morning we tore up the entire front sitting deck, and all of the original […]

We had several conversations about the use of the new space, where the door and windows would go, and the like. We agreed that we wanted plenty of south-facing windows and that they would have to be of some opening style with a screen option. We found some excellent Caradco™ double-hung windows at a good […]

I ’ve been practicing “timber framing for the rest of us” since 1975, but I never thought I’d write a book about it, so I wasn’t careful about photographing the methods. When students at Earthwood said they really wanted a book on the subject, Jaki and I decided to build a second-story sunroom. We didn’t […]

Joe Zinni, like Larry Schuth and Mark Powers, is a former cordwood masonry student at Earthwood. He and his wife Glenna found a 1.25-acre piece building lot they liked in Tenino, Washington, an area where local sawmills are cutting lots of very large timbers. Joe described a friend’s sawmill to me: “Rob, picture a giant […]

Insulating a plank-and-beam roof is a little different than other styles without exposed beams. Log End Cottage had a fairly steep roof, with a slope of about eight-in-twelve (8:12). In that home, the “beam” component consisted of full — sized recycled three-by-tens. We planked over this with ordinary one-inch planking from the sawmill, planed one […]

“Plank and beam” roofing consists of planks — often tongue-in-groove — supported from below by exposed beams, or rafters. This is the system we used at Log End Cottage, Log End Cave, and Earthwood, and it is my favorite roof support system for three reasons: i. We like the aesthetic appeal of exposed beams, with […]