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VTF - An Efficient Approach to a Custom Timber Frame Home

Just about every timber frame we’ve ever built has been a custom design. We welcome you to peruse plans in our VTF Natural Home Series, and we will continue to add and feature new designs all the time, but VTF can now generate custom home plans for less than what many folks pay for stock plans from other sources. We believe strongly in developing a building design that is individualized to suit your needs, tastes, budget, and site. Our Natural Home Series designs - alongside your clippings, pictures, sketches, and ideas - tend to serve as an ideal starting point for a custom design dialogue if you don’t find one that suits all of your needs. Our custom design services satisfy the niche of clients who have a good overall sense of what they want in their new home, but need some help developing their ideas into the reality of a beautiful timber frame home.

Vermont Timber Frames is fortunate to have Bob Speck on board as our principal designer. Bob is a licensed structural engineer, but over the past ten years or so he has focused more on helping clients arrive at beautiful, sensible timber frame home plans. Bob has a keen eye for visual balance in American building design and his insight into timber frame engineering is a tremendous asset in arriving at a visually exciting, cost-effective timber frame home. He is also a member of the Vermont Green Building Network and a voracious student of sustainable and green building concepts such as geothermal energy and photovoltaic systems. He is a great resource for all things ‘green’.

If you are building in the Northeast, Bob will walk the site with you to consider firsthand issues such as views, topography, and potential solar orientation. The integration of the house design with the landscape is a vital component of a home’s curb appeal and overall value. Bob has developed an efficient system for design intake and he will ask questions, establish parameters, gather information, and look at photos or clippings to allow the design concept to take shape. Bob’s ability to synthesize all this information, visualize your ideas, and transfer them to pen & paper is truly and consistently astounding. His system is so efficient that Bob has been able to do remote design work for clients as far away as Wyoming.

We typically ask for a $3500 investment in order to coordinate the site visit and design intake meeting. Shortly after the session, we begin to correspond back and forth with you - typically via email - to arrive at the perfect floor plans and elevations, clearly depicted through our design software. Once you have approved the initial design, our project managers take over and further detail the timber frame design, count the joinery, and preliminarily size the timbers. You will receive drawings of the 3-D computer model of the timber frame and/or SIPs. We can give you an extremely accurate budget figure for our scope of work at this point in the process, while the floor plans and elevations allow you to begin getting numbers for the rest of the house - foundation, roofing, siding, cabinets, etc. Since the design process is a fluid one, if you find you need to make modifications, downsize, simplify, reduce the amount of timber framing (to create a 'hybrid' structure blending timber framing with SIPs or conventional construction), etc, we can easily adapt the design with further iterations to find the perfect balance of aesthetics and budget. The $3500 usually covers the cost of several iterations - we rarely need to collect more funds for this part of the design process. The $3500 is ultimately applied to the VTF material package cost.

Beyond this point, VTF and our associated engineering consultants coordinate any other aspects of the building process that may be necessary, including: help through the permitting process, site and foundation engineering services, structural framing plans for both conventional and timber framing, and consulting services for efficient building enclosure systems. VTF fabricates the engineered timber frame in the controlled environment of our shop in Bennington, VT, and our own VTF crews can erect the timber frame and install the Timberline Structural Insulated Panels on-site.