Is timber frame the same as post-and-beam?

No. Both use large members instead of many small ones, but a traditional timber frame is joined with cut wood joinery — mortise and tenon, pegged. Post-and-beam generally uses steel connectors, plates, and bolts. The look and the cost are different.

Is conventional stick framing cheaper?

Per square foot, almost always. It uses stock lumber, needs no crane for most of the work, and any competent crew can do it. The trade is that nothing is meant to be seen.

Guides · Flathead Valley, MT

Timber frame, post-and-beam, or conventional framing

What's the difference between timber frame, post-and-beam, and stick framing?

Three different things get called “timber framing” in conversation, and they price out very differently. Here is how we’d separate them.

Conventional framing (stick framing)

Dimensional lumber — 2x6 studs, joists, rafters or trusses — assembled on site, sheathed, and covered. Loads are spread across a lot of small members rather than concentrated into a few big ones.

Looking down over a whole floor of stud walls standing in their unit layout, every stud numbered in red crayon, one of the crew working at the far right and snow-covered mountains across the valley behind. — The 12plex — A 12-unit multi-family building of about 19,000 square feet — the largest project we'd taken on at the time, and the one that proved we could run work at that scale.

It uses stock material from any yard, needs no crane for most of its work, and the skill is in speed and accuracy rather than joinery. It is the cheapest per square foot by a wide margin, and it is what the overwhelming majority of houses and commercial buildings are. Our 12plex is 19,000 square feet of it.

Nothing in a stick frame is meant to be looked at. It is structure that disappears behind drywall.

Post-and-beam

Large posts and beams carrying the load, with the walls between them doing much less work. The connections are typically made with steel — plates, brackets, through-bolts — which is faster to fabricate and easier to engineer than cut joinery.

A row of heavy timber rafters cantilevering out over the wall on their posts and beams, bolted at every joint, with one of the crew working along the top at the far end. — Quinlan Residence — Framing of a roughly 6,300 square foot home including garage (about 5,200 square feet of main living space), the company's first project in the Whitefish Hills area.

You get the open spans and the visible structure without the cost of traditional joinery. Whether the exposed steel reads as honest or as a compromise is a matter of taste, and it is worth deciding before the drawings are done rather than after the brackets show up.

Traditional timber frame

Large timbers joined with wood joinery — mortise and tenon, pegged — cut so the frame is self-supporting and meant to be seen. The frame goes up as a structure in its own right, then gets enclosed.

This is the expensive one, and it is expensive in ways that are not obvious. The timbers are cut to order. The layout has to be right before anything is cut, because a tenon in the wrong place is not a piece you fix on site. Setting the frame takes a crane and a crew that has done it before. And the schedule has a hard dependency in it: the frame cannot go up until the timbers arrive, and those timbers are being made for you.

A timber bent assembled flat in a clearing before it is set, each member numbered by hand from one to six, a curved arch chord spanning between the legs and a telehandler holding it up while two of the crew work at the joints. — Scotty's — Just under 7,000 square feet, with rounded timber work that had to be steam-bent at a custom mill before it could be set. Wall heights varied significantly through the house, with some walls running over 16 feet tall.

What this means on a real set of plans

Most large custom houses in this valley are not one of these three. They are a combination — timber where it is exposed and doing the long spans, conventional framing for everything else. That is most of what we do.

Looking along the top of the walls where heavy timber beams cross the stud framing, a line of red steel rafters running away to the right above scaffold, with the valley and far mountains beyond. — Quinlan Residence

The part people underestimate is the seam. Where a timber frame meets conventional framing, somebody has to have thought about how the two systems move, how the loads transfer, and what the finish detail looks like. Getting that wrong is not a structural problem so much as an expensive-looking one.

If you have drawings and you’re not sure which of these they’re asking for, send them over. We’ll tell you what you’ve actually got.

Quick answers

Is timber frame the same as post-and-beam?: No. Both use large members instead of many small ones, but a traditional timber frame is joined with cut wood joinery — mortise and tenon, pegged. Post-and-beam generally uses steel connectors, plates, and bolts. The look and the cost are different.
Is conventional stick framing cheaper?: Per square foot, almost always. It uses stock lumber, needs no crane for most of the work, and any competent crew can do it. The trade is that nothing is meant to be seen.
Can one house use more than one method?: Most of the large houses we frame do. Timber where it is exposed and doing the long spans, conventional framing everywhere else. The two have to be detailed to work together.

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.

(406) 270-8642 Send us your plans