TABBERSON ARCHITECTS — We stopped in Muncie, Indiana a number of times as we road-tripped from South Carolina to Michigan with loads of beams and boards. Our evening departure would get us to Bill Taberson’s office around breakfast time.

Our initial drawings were for a more traditional timber frame home. We didn’t plan to build right away and our goal was to put up a modest barn on our property to store our boards and beams for a future build, however, the township would not allow us to put up a barn first. With that setback, we decided to build a barn and give it living space as a workaround. But then we realized that we wouldn’t have enough wood for both a house and barn, so somehow our house morphed into a barn home.

FUN FACT: Scott was intentional in having a 12/12 pitch roof so that every cut on the house was either a 45 or 90 degree angle cut (easy math).

NOTES: We made a few changes to our final drawings to simplify things and save costs. We put all the queen posts vertically in line and we put in 36′ long beams to avoid all the joints that would have been required.

BURK CONSTRUCTION — Scott met Paxx Burk (Kentucky) at a timber frame conference in Atlanta in January 2015. Paxx is the only one who gave us confidence that we could build our timber frame by ourselves. He answered the 1001 questions Scott had and gave Scott critical tips.

Paxx and his crew helped us put up the last few bents on the house and put all the roof boards on when we ran out of vacation time in July 2017.

HIGH CALIBER CONCRETE COATINGS LLC —  We had contemplated a DIY garage floor project, but knew it would be a ton of work, messy, and we weren’t guaranteed that we would be satisfied with the results or that we would have a garage floor that would look good in the long term. We are so glad we called in the experts!

Jeff Neibarger, the owner, was such a pleasure to work with! He came out to discuss our options and helped guide us in what would work best for our garage floors. He and his team got the job done in a few days, and wow, are we happy with the results!

RAY T — Ray was so instrumental in our building timeline. He cut a good portion of the logs towards the completion of the project and he cut the majority of the mortise and tenens. Ray is a retired carpenter who never did any timber framing but tackled the problems with us and together we figured things out. Ray made sure we had a square and straight house.  When we worked 10 hours a day for three weeks, Ray kept us on track.

Ray also built our garage doors.

BRUCE T — Where to begin? Bruce has been involved in so many facets of our construction project! We met Bruce years ago at Bible college, and we are grateful to call him friend.

Bruce and his crew have their thumbprints all over and braved all kinds of weather. They were our main construction crew.

They did everything from power washing the boards in the late fall (2017), to studding in the walls between the beams, placing the subfloor joists, hanging the exterior boards and siding, cutting in and hanging the windows, putting the steel roof on, building the porch and much, much more! We are grateful!

TOM VH — We were beginning the interior work of our home in the late spring of 2017. We had just moved back into the area and ran into Tom at church. We needed an experienced finish carpenter, and God gave us Tom. Tom grew up learning carpentry from his father. It was due to Tom and Bruce that we learned carpentry is truly an art. Both Tom and Bruce are highly skilled custom carpenters!

Five days a week Tom and Benita worked as a team, ripping boards (Benita sanding each one), hanging boards on walls, putting down the floors, trim, making and installing our countertops, building our garage cabinets, a custom spice rack, entry way bench, closets, shelving, repairing our windmill, you name it. Tom also built our barn doors.

FUN FACT: Along the way Tom would ask Benita questions. She honestly had no idea, so her line was, “What would Tom do?” And he would tell her, and they would carry on. On rare occasions they might make a blunder, and their response to that was always, “it’s a barn”…it’s just a barn. 🙂

BILL VH — Our expert electrician! We have over 1.5 miles of electrical wire throughout the house. We are so grateful that Bill was able to help us with all of our custom requests. He was able to help us find unique ways to make it all happen. Outlets on beams, yep, we have that!

FUN FACT: One night Scott and I were trying to figure out how to place all of our kitchen cabinets. There was a bit of a tetris act going on; we were tired, and it wasn’t working out. Bill was wrapping up for the day and walked over to have a look. Somehow Bill was able to figure it out and make it work!

There are so many more helpers and people who were instrumental to our building success. We can’t possibly list and thank them all here!