Guides · Flathead Valley, MT
How long it takes to frame a large house
How long does it take to frame a 10,000 square foot house?
The honest answer is that square footage barely predicts it. Four of our jobs, with real durations:
| Job | Size | Crew | Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Shire | 12,000 sq ft, three stories | 5 | 7 months to frame |
| McDaniels | just under 11,000 sq ft | 5 | 4 months, roughly two-thirds done |
| InterBel, Eureka | just over 7,000 sq ft commercial | — | 8 days |
| The 12plex | 19,000 sq ft | — | one of our first jobs at that scale |
Seven thousand square feet in eight days, and twelve thousand in seven months. That is roughly fifteen times the daily rate, and the buildings are not fifteen times different in size.
What sets the schedule
Whether the material exists yet. This is the big one. Conventional framing runs on lumber that is already sitting in a yard. A custom timber house runs on timbers that are being cut for you, to spans nobody stocks, sometimes at a mill in another state. The frame does not start when the crew is ready. It starts when the timbers arrive.
How much of it repeats. InterBel was commercial — a shape that repeats, details that repeat, a crew that can get into a rhythm and stay there for a week. A custom house at The Shire’s level has almost nothing that repeats. Every bay is its own problem.
How many parties have to agree. The hardest part of these jobs is not the cutting. It is making the whole thing happen — us, the timber framers, the general contractor, the lumber yards, the truss supplier — when everything is custom and every piece has a lead time attached. A beam that arrives in the wrong order doesn’t cost you a day, it costs you the sequence.
The weather you’re building through. Morton’s was a winter build and it cost us. That is its own subject.
How to read a schedule you’ve been given
If someone quotes you a framing duration on a custom timber house before the timber is ordered, they are quoting you the part they control and leaving out the part they don’t. Ask when the timbers are scheduled to arrive, and ask what the mill’s lead time is. That date, not crew size, is usually the one your schedule hangs on.
And ask what crew will actually be on it. Ours are five men on the big jobs, and they are the same five — we’ve never kept people on just because we needed bodies.
Quick answers
- How long does a 10,000 square foot custom house take to frame?
- On our jobs at that size, months rather than weeks. A 12,000 square foot timber frame house took a five-man crew seven months. An 11,000 square foot house was four months in and roughly two-thirds framed.
- Why did a 7,000 square foot commercial building only take eight days?
- Different building. InterBel in Eureka was conventional commercial framing — repetitive, stock material, no custom timber and nothing waiting on a mill. Square footage is not what sets the schedule.
- What is the biggest cause of delay?
- Waiting on custom material, and coordination between the parties — the timber framers, the general contractor, the lumber yards, the truss supplier. On a custom house nothing is off the shelf, so every piece has a lead time attached to it.
Got a set of plans?
We'll look at them and tell you what the framing side of it actually means — timber, schedule, and what we'd want to know before quoting it.