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| The exterior
of the house on our cover, with window wall and balcony overlooking
the White Mountains. Photo by Rich Frutchey. |
| "One of our strengths as a building company," Kruse continues,
"is our excellent in-house design staff. We have four full-time
designers who use AutoCAD or a Swiss program names CADWorks to come
up with a plan that fulfills whatever a customer's sense of taste
and their pocketbook will allow.
"Often,
the people who build post and beam are active customers who like
to be involved with the building process. If they come to us first,
and we produce a design and they go on contract, we often then put
them in touch with a builder who has post and beam experience. That
way, they have plans to take to the builder for pricing. Or we can
work with plans created by an architect and create a frame based
on those plans.
"We stay
involved right up through the end of the project, and often people
will call us with questions. They might want additional timbers,
stairs or ladders, for example, or posts for a second floor railing.
We've added porch bents. One customer had a little boy with a second
floor loft, and we took a six-by-eight post and drilled it, put
in pegs as steps, forming a ladder. He loved to climb up there and
play pirate with his toys."
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| One
builder who enjoyed working with North Woods, from start to finish,
was Bruce Noble of Noble Construction on Isle La Motte, who built
a home for Bill and Marj Hill on family land overlooking Lake Champlain,
based on a design by architect Bill Rienecke of Black River Design
in Montpelier. The home recently was featured in the Spring 2002 issue
of Timber Frame homes, and several of those same photographs accompany
this article.
Says Noble:
"I knew about the quality of North Woods from working with
them once before, I told the Hills, 'This thing is going to be a
sweet piece of work', and it was. We put in the foundation, and
then their crew arrived. In three days, they had the whole frame
up. Their work was so precise it wasn't funny. When you're working
with timbers that size, it's easy to be off by a sixteenth of an
inch, but they weren't. It made my job a lot easier. We didn't have
to be shimming this and shimming that. After we dropped a plumb
bob a few times, and it was right on, we began to take it for granted.
"That
frame was like cabinet work, but with beams."
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| The home's dining
room and kitchen featured a Douglas Fir frame, crafted from a salvaged
logging boom for this home by North Woods Joinery. Photo by Rich Frutchey. |
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