The beautiful landscapes that are seen throughout Colorado are well worth taking advantage of, and building a home that blends in with this landscape is easy when you consider building a timber frame home.

A timber frame home is not just a part of current housing trends, a timber home can offer many advantages to those looking to build a sustainable yet attractive home.

timber frame houses

Source: Trilogy Partners

  • Timber frame homes give you the opportunity to take in the seasons and views due to their ability to hold plenty of windows. These windows maximize natural lighting, let you take advantage of the views, and make your home feel larger.
  • Wrapping a timber home in insulated panels can yield great energy efficiency; this tight envelope created around a timber home greatly reduces your heating and cooling costs.
  • A timber home blends in well with the surrounding environment, this is especially true in Colorado where our landscape can be filled with rich browns, oranges, and greens.

It is easy to see why timber homes are filling the housing trends landscape once again. Want more information for your future home build project? Contact Trilogy today!

 

Buildings up to 30 storeys possible, award-winning architect tells conference

BY RANDY BOSWELL, POSTMEDIA NEWS A study funded by the B.C. government to help promote the province’s forestry sector will conclude that buildings as tall as 30 storeys could be made almost entirely out of wood, says an award-winning Vancouver architect leading the research.

Michael Green, who detailed his vision for the world’s first “timber skyscraper” during a keynote address last week at a Green Cities conference in Australia, told Postmedia News on Monday that a provincially supported study due to be released later this month will show that such buildings can be cost-saving as well as both fire-and earthquakesafe, and that Canada is ideally positioned to lead an emerging global “race” to reinvent the highrise construction industry -with wood challenging steel and concrete as the ideal building material.

“The exciting thing is, from an engineering point of view, we think we have something that is on track to be able to design -comfortably -20storey buildings,” said Green, a partner in the Vancouver firm McFarlane Green Biggar Architecture + Design Inc.

“And certainly, we believe, quite reasonably, we’ll be able to stretch that to 30 storeys.”

A nine-storey building in Britain now the world’s tallest wooden structure. Green said a 10-storey project in Australia, a 17-storey building in Norway and a 30-storey structure in Austria have been proposed recently.

The Green-led Canadian study is a “pre-feasibility” analysis of what could become the world’s tallest wooden highrise -a 12-storey structure envisioned for an undisclosed Vancouver location. The study is being funded as part of an initiative launched last year by B.C. Forests Minister Pat Bell.

“It is our understanding that based on preliminary research results, Michael Green thinks that it may be possible to build a 30-storey building using wood-hybrid construction,” ministry spokeswoman Vivian Thomas told Postmedia News.

“We’re looking forward to receiving and reviewing the results of MGB’s research before deciding on next steps,” she added. “In April 2009, B.C. amended its building code to allow six-storey wood frame construction -the previous building height limit for wood frame construction was four storeys.”

In announcing the $1.75-million creation of the Wood Enterprise Coalition in April, Bell highlighted the province’s particularly rich endowment of forest resources and pledged the seed funding “to promote the use of wood in commercial and institutional construction.

The head of one of the coalition partners, the provincial marketing organization WoodWORKS! BC, hailed the initiative as another sign of the “renewed interest and renaissance in building with wood.”

WoodWORKS! B.C. executive director Mary Tracey said at the time the fund would help “build momentum in the ‘Wood First’ movement in B.C., across Canada and around the world.”

Among the first grants disbursed by the coalition was to Green and his MGB Architect colleagues, who won a top North American design award last year for their eye-popping creation of a retail restroom in Vancouver’s Gastown district with walls made from 5,000 paperback novels.

Green said Canada should be a leader in developing wood-highrise projects and expertise, and points to recent innovations in construction techniques that allow bigger, stronger modules of wood to be used in erecting much taller structures than previously imagined.

Vancouver’s potential prototype wooden highrise would demonstrate the ecological benefits, economic value and structural strength of wood-based construction, he said.

“My dream is to build a skyscraper ith a wood structure,” Green also rote in a recent essay. “That coment usually brings a bit of rumble rom the back of the room as it may eem absurd in today’s wood context, ut today’s context will not be with us or long. New engineered products are hanging the scale of our dreams.”

In an interview from Melbourne, Green said the environmental benefits of using wood for highrise construction -especially in a country such as Canada, where sustainable forestry management is widely practised -would, in the near future, be the key competitive advantage over carbonintensive steel and concrete.

OSB SIPs

Structural Insulating Panels (SIPs) are a composite building material consisting of a panel of insulating material, usually foam, sandwiched between two wooden layers. The wood can be oriented strand board (OSB) or plywood. Sometimes more exotic materials, such as sheet metal or concrete board, are substituted for the wooden layers. SIPs replace several components found in conventionally framed buildings including studs, joists and insulation. SIPs are most commonly used to construct exterior walls and roofs but may have other applications, such as insulated ceilings beneath conventionally framed roof truss systems.

Structural Insulating Panels have a history dating back to the 1940s when structural wall panels were first invented. Over the years the technologies and materials incorporated in SIPs have improved. In addition, computerized CNC cutting machines allow SIP panels to be factory manufactured and then cut to the exact size needed for construction, providing a certain level of prefabrication not seen in conventional construction.

Panels for Walls and Roofs

Homes using SIP panel construction tend to have a very tight envelope. Air infiltration, or draftiness, is eliminated and the walls themselves have a very high insulating quality. SIPs may cost more than conventional framing, but because they bring extreme energy efficiency to buildings, they lower operating costs. SIP panels are often combined with post and beam construction where the panels drape the frame creating an extremely durable and energy efficient structure. Trilogy Partners utilizes SIP panels in all of its Timber Frame and Post and Beam homes.

965 N Ten Mile Dr. , Unit A1 Frisco, CO 80443
Phone: 970-453-2230

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