TIMBERFRAME, POST and BEAM HOMES

Before the first blueprint was drawn, before the first beam was raised, Rick Swanson and Jane Sturtz knew exactly what they wanted for their timber home. The couple had spent plenty of time poring over books and magazine, and visiting as many timber homes as they could to get ideas and inspiration.

“It really opened our eyes to things,” Jane says. “We could pick up on what we did and didn’t like.”

While figuring out how they wanted their home to look was easy, finding someone who was willing to do things the way they wanted wasn’t as simple. And so, despite the fact that their construction experience was limited to some light finish work in their previous home, Rick and Jane decided to served as their own general contractors.

“We wanted things done a certain way,” Rick explains. “We contracted a lot of it, but we also did quite a bit of the work ourselves.”

That work included hanging drywall, painting, staining floors and trim (the timbers weren’t stained, but received a coat of linseed oil and turpentine), and routing all the home’s electrical wiring through channels in the beams. For a year and a half (eight months of which was spent living onsite in a 27-foot travel trailer with their kids, Tracy and Matthew, then 7 and 5, while they waited for the home’s shell to be enclosed), Rick and Jane devoted a good portion of each day to perfecting their home.

“Looking back,” Jane says, “I found that I really grew as a person. I learned to have a lot of patience.”

A Helping Hand

Rick and Jane weren’t completely alone in the homebuilding process, though –they got plenty of help and advice from North Woods Joinery, which supplied the home’s hemlock timbers.

“Larry Kruse and Pete Kochalka were really friendly and really easy to get along with,” Rick says of the owners of North Woods. “That’s one of the reasons we chose them.”

That cordial relationship even transcended the distance from North Wood’s office in Jeffersonville, VT, to the couple’s construction site in Moore’s Hill, Indiana. Although Rick, a pilot for a local cargo company, flew to Vermont for his initial meeting with North Woods, much of the design process played out via phone and email.

“I would call them a couple times a day,” recalls Jane, who worked closely with the designers at North Woods to create the home’s custom floorplan.

“The design was pretty straightforward,” Larry adds. “Rick and Jane had an overall concept of the size and room placement they wanted, and we helped them define the details.”

One such detail is what Jane refers to as her “sun space,” a 16-by-8-foot nook at the front of the house, enclosed by four angled glass panels that are separated by recycled hemlock timbers.

“Because the glass was attached directly to the frame, we had to make sure there was no twisting and drying of the timbers,” Larry says of the decision to use reclaimed wood for this section of the house. “We have pretty good ...