we did it!

All dolled up just in in time for the holidays!

It’s official! She’s up and we actually timber framed a commercial building! I think we can officially call ourselves timber framers now, right? :)

After months of design and back and forth with our timber framing engineers, even more months of Dan on a sawmill to process almost 600 logs, and thousands of hours marking beams and cutting them (512!), everything was finally ready to be transferred over to the stagecoach to be assembled and raised! Our goal was to raise everything by hand up until the second floor and then assemble all the roof trusses on the ground so they could be craned up and put in.

Us the day we finished the last beam! So tired and exhausted but so much relief :’)

We started raising the Friday after Thanksgiving and while we are still putting the finishing pegs in, the bulk was done over the prior 3 weeks. It felt like a fever dream watching it all come together. I don’t think we have ever experienced such a hard workout or been more exhausted or tired in our lives, but it was such a magnificent experience seeing everything come to life after spending over a year staring at blueprints and paper copies of what it was going to be.

And here she is. Our labor of love, our devotion to this craft, our gift to the community. And all we ask is that you cherish her deeply. Dan painstakingly milled every single piece of the frame and siding and paneling with his own two hands. He touched every tree and turned it into something beautiful. Our engineers obsessed over every joint, making sure it would be strong for centuries to come. I laid out every single beam and joint to half a millimeter so that it would be cut to perfection. And our amazing team of subcontractors (a full time firefighter who generously gave us his off days, two high schoolers who gave us their precious summers, and a passionate woodworker who came every single week from Minnesota!) cut each beam to perfection, making sure to take the utmost care following razor thin lines.

I hope people generations from now will be able to feel the love and care that went into this building. She is a monument of perseverance, strength, and love. And now as much as she is ours, she is yours, too.

Enjoy.

d & r