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Tim is Carpenter Oak & Woodland’s managing director. Tim has extensive experience of managing companies of all sizes, in many business sectors, including construction and building. Tim’s no-nonsense hands-on approach, coupled with his outstanding management experience and commercial acumen, make him the ideal complement to the craft-based skills of the rest of the team.
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The new Homebuilding and Renovation issue (August 2007) is worth having a look at, and specifically the cover story “Brand New Oak Frame House”. In many ways this is a typical mass, machine manufactured house but the images here are particularly interesting because they illustrate many of the potential issues with building in green oak. I’m often aware that when we train our apprentice craftspeople it’s not always easy to demonstrate problems caused by either poor timber selection, inappropriate techniques or bad design detailing – by definition in the projects we undertake we work very hard to avoid these problems, so we don’t have any examples to show the consequences. But here are some useful illustrations:
On pages 56 and 64, you can see the exposed timber ends of the ridge, purlins and top plates – a guaranteed invitation to rot even if regular treatment is given.
The exposed end grain of the ridges and purlins
On page 59 you can clearly see the results of terrible timber grading in the beam by the top of the post. This illustrates why the slope of the grain is so critical and in this case has caused serious failure in a key structural area. This timber should never have been used.
Structural failure of the floor beam
On page 61 you can see the base of the right-hand door post has twisted. It’s either a poorly fitted cover board or a solid post itself again badly selected.
Poor timber selection results in avoidable twisting
Finally on Page 62 you can see the effect of not accounting for shrinkage in the end gable, it appears that the tenons were not pegged offset, and therefore not drawn together. It’s unlikely to be a problem, but it does look a bit amateurish.
Good practice would have avoided making this shrinkage so obvious
We always emphasise that a green oak frame will shake and move, and it is this understanding that is so critical to eliminating unnecessary problems, or at worst reducing the effect of the unavoidable ones. All the above problems are unnecessary, indicating poor design, bad selection and either ignorance or ignoring good practice. They are clearly avoidable.
And as a by the way, look at the orientation of the house, and where the sun is. It illustrates just how important the location and aspect of the house is to really accommodate light, solar gain and passive heating - designers, please note.
And one final comment I just can’t resist ….. build cost £600,000. That’s a staggering £3,429 per square metre, more than double a typical build price. It’s no wonder people get the impression that building a timber frame house is expensive when they read articles like this.
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