Our Story

For years I had a dream of building a place with plenty of space for friends and family to gather. In search of wide-open landscapes with rolling hills, we began to look at properties, finally settling on a plot of land in the heart of an Amish community.  

Our early interaction with our Amish neighbours was around having our first bunkie built.  We started with a very simple 10ft x 12ft bunkie that served as our base while we planned for our future off-grid cabin.

Having long admired the Timber Frame look that we see in the century old barns that scatter the countryside, we soon decided that a timber frame structure would meet our needs and would allow us to experiment by including some non-traditional elements into our cabin.

It was natural that we would turn to our Amish neighbors for assistance in building our cabin. We found a young 23 year old Amish builder that, while he had zero experience with Timber Framing techniques, it was clear that he was a hard worker and had an innate understanding of wood.  We purchased for him a Ted Benson “how to” book on timber framing and asked him to produce one sample beam and knee brace combination.  Based on his enthusiasm and a hand sketch we decided to work with him to build our dream cabin.   

One of the things we have come to appreciate about the Amish community is the degree to which family and community comes together to make things happen.  In that spirit our builder Roy recruited his brother in law Noah, his cousins Enus and Atlee and the neighbor Jonny to build our Timber Frame cabin.

In addition to the locally milled lumber we wanted to incorporate straw bale and earthen walls into our build.  I recall a conversation that I had with a local farmer as I explained to him that I wanted to build our walls with straw bales.  His response was “he huffed, and he puffed, and he blew the house down”.  Many of you will recognize this as a line from the children’s story of the three little pigs.

We loved the process of building with the Amish and we valued the honesty of the timber frame where you could at a glance see how the frame supported the roof and walls. Timber framing offers a great deal of freedom as all the loads are carried by the frame, therefore walls, windows and doors can be placed where it suits.

Having completed the first Timber Frame on our off grid property we liked it so much that we went on to build three more cabins in similar style.

It was this experience that led us to creating Timber Bunkie Kits so others could enjoy the Amish built Timber Frame experience.