The Construction Industry is broken. Unlike almost every other industry in the modern world, the cost of building a home has only increased since 1965. Even with all the technology available, something about building a home is inherently difficult.
Our tendency to ask why is an integral part of the Timber Age™ culture and encourages our teams to address three important challenges...
Problem one:
People aren't "sticking" in rural communities like our hometown of Durango, CO. When people aren't sure if they can stick in a community for the long term, those people are less likely to invest in community. A lack of high quality, affordable housing is a major contributing factor to this issue.
Problem two:
A shrinking skilled labor force, particularly in rural communities, is making the lack of affordable housing worse. Scarcity drives prices up and isn't getting any better when four people leave the trades for every one who joins. 90% of construction projects are over-budget and behind schedule.
Problem Three:
Western US forests are unhealthy. Our forests are overcrowded and more susceptible to disease and death. These tightly-bunched trees along with higher levels of drought contribute to record-breaking wildfires every year. In our local forests alone, over one million board feet of wood must be removed from the forest every year for the next twenty years to approach natural stand densities. Much of this wood was previously unused, resulting in wood decomposing or being burned in forest fires or fireplaces.
Forest health is a hot topic, particularly in the west. With drought and density increasing the mortality rates of trees, it is no wonder we are seeing larger wildfires threaten urban/forest interface communities more often. There is widespread belief that all logging is bad, however, when done responsibly and sustainably forest treatment can truly benefit the forest.
Timber Age™ utilizes Ponderosa Pine harvested with modern low impact equipment to reduce the likelihood of fire. Through utilization of the wood in our building system, we provide a carbon-sequestering outlet.
This use prevents the typical destinations of burn piles, forest fires or simply rotting on the forest floor. Either process produces carbon that is released into the atmosphere. By using wood in durable building assemblies, we sequester that carbon for 100 years or more.
We are always looking for ways to make the work visible as soon as possible at Timber Age™. Design and planning are no exceptions. One of the issues plaguing the building industry is a tendency for projects to be over schedule and over budget. While this is in no small part due to material sourcing issues, design and planning also play a role. It is much easier for many parties involved to make changes to a structure (out of necessity or want) even after the structure has started to go vertical causing costly delays to the customer.
The inherent need to finalize designs early to accommodate off-site building, combined with Timber Age's desire to improve upon build time and labor efficiency have led us to provide well defined requirements and processes for designing with the Timber Age™ Modular Building System (TAMBS).
The word modular may invoke images of rickety structures that end up falling apart after twenty years. Even the 'high end' modular structures developed in recent years typically don't meet the standards of traditional stick built homes. In addition, shipping a box of air is logistically very inefficient.
Don't get us wrong, traditional modular and manufactured homes serve an important purpose in the market, but what if there was a better way? By occupying a middle ground between fully factory built units and traditional building, Timber Age™ can be the best of both worlds. We build a highly durable, panelized system that can be shipped flat, with almost zero wasted space and reduce on-site build times while providing better, safer, more consistent, and fulfilling work for our people.
When talking about building, most people think of energy when they hear efficiency. Energy efficiency is an inherent quality of every TAMBS structure. Our standard panel is thermally broken, R-52, and air sealed using two membrane layers. This not only future proofs our system for years of building code updates, it makes the system easily adaptable to Passive House standards.,
Off-Site building allows us to pull much of the work of building a house forward in the process. This enables us to have a building weather-tight in days instead of weeks, or months. Time to occupancy is reduced with the ability to perform site prep and assembly of structural components at the factory simultaneously. Our panels ship in 10' x 20' sections, enabling entire walls and roof pitches to be set at once drastically reducing time to occupancy.
Forest health is a hot topic, particularly in the west. With drought, and density increasing the mortality rates of trees, it is no wonder we are seeing larger wildfires threaten urban/forest interface communities more often. There is widespread belief that all logging is bad, however, when done responsibly and sustainably forest treatment can truly benefit the forest.
Timber Age™ utilizes Ponderosa Pine harvested with modern low impact equipment to reduce the likelihood of fire. Through utilization in our building system, we provide a carbon-sequestering outlet for the wood. This prevents the typical destinations of burn piles, forest fires or simply rotting on the forest floor. Either process produces carbon that is released into the atmosphere. By using wood in durable building assemblies, we sequester that carbon for 100 years or more.
We are always looking for ways to make the work visible as soon as possible at Timber Age™. Design and planning are no exceptions. One of the issues plaguing the building industry is a tendency for projects to be over schedule and over budget. While this is in no small part due to material sourcing issues, design and planning also play a role. It is much easier for many parties involved to make changes to a structure (out of necessity or want) even after the structure has started to go vertical causing costly delays to the customer.
The inherent need to finalize designs early to accommodate off-site building, combined with Timber Age's desire to improve upon build time and labor efficiency have led us to provide well defined requirements and processes for designing with the Timber Age™ Modular Building System (TAMBS).
The word modular may invoke images of rickety structures that end up falling apart after twenty years. Even the 'high end' modular structures developed in recent years typically don't meet the standards of traditional stick built homes. In addition, shipping a box of air is logistically very inefficient.
Don't get us wrong, traditional modular and manufactured homes serve an important purpose in the market, but what if there was a better way? By occupying a middle ground between fully factory built units and traditional building, Timber Age™ can be the best of both worlds. We build a highly durable, panelized system that can be shipped flat, with almost zero wasted space and reduce on-site build times while providing better, safer, more consistent, and fulfilling work for our people.
When talking about building, most people think of energy when they hear efficiency. Energy efficiency is an inherent quality of every TAMBS structure. Our standard panel is thermally broken, R-52, and air sealed using two membrane layers. This not only future proofs our system for years of building code updates, it makes the system easily adaptable to Passive House standards.
Off-Site building allows us to pull much of the work of building a house forward in the process. This enables us to have a building weather-tight in days instead of weeks, or months. Time to occupancy is reduced with the ability to perform site prep and assembly of structural components at the factory simultaneously. Our panels ship in 10' x 20' sections, enabling entire walls and roof pitches to be set at once drastically reducing time to occupancy.
