Historic Preservation

We like to think of timber frame preservation like a 150k mile service. The car will get a lot of new parts and love, but it will last another 150k miles before it needs a service like that again, and in this case miles are years.

Small preservation projects can be completed in 1-2 months. But large projects that require new foundations and extensive timber work often need an entire year to complete.

We first do an on-site assessment of the building to make sure it is a building that we can save and that we would be a good fit for. We then develop a plan and estimate based on our assessment and past experience preserving old timber-frames. We also draw on Scratch Builder’s owner’s experience in preservation, which goes all the way back to a Historic Preservation degree at the North Bennett Street School in Boston.

Preserving an old timber frame is often a large structural and monetary undertaking. Generally almost all old frames need a new foundation, foundation shoring, or some combination. This means that they generally need coordination between a house jacking company, a concrete company, and the timber frame contractor. This is a challenging process that we can guide our clients through or general contract ourselves.

Preservation vs. adaptive re-use are two opposing totems. We tend to be practical in our approach, we want to preserve as much as possible, but we understand clients often wouldn’t spend so many resources on preservation if there are not some adaptive reuse elements. We look at the whole project broadly, make recommendations that we think are necessary, but ultimately we want to not only see old buildings saved, we want to see them used!

We save old timbers by scarfing together new pieces of timber onto an old timber, which creates a very interesting look. In some cases the timber is so rotten we have to replace the whole piece, so we fabricate a new timber identical to the old one. In minor cases we can repair some damage with structural screws or other mechanical fasteners.