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It’s easy to sound glib, but one of the simplest and most effective ways to build green is to build well. The better organised the team, the less time and less resources get wasted. And the clearer the instructions, the more likely it is that they will get carried out correctly first time.
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This elementary lesson was re-inforced on a visit I made to Scotland last week as guest of the UK Timber Frame Association.
Scotland is the spiritual home of timber frame in the UK with as many as two thirds of all housing starts there using timber walling methods, a figure that’s been growing steadily since the Scots first started using timber framing methods back in the 1960s. In contrast, England’s use of timber frame as a housebuilding method has blown hot and cold.
What sets the Scottish timber frame experience apart isn’t so much the technology (which is very similar), but the processes they use to take best advantage of it. As the Scottish housebuilding sector has moved across to timber frame, the trades have learned to adapt and they have in fact created a new skillset, which they refer to as “the roughing joiner”, broadly equivalent to the first-fix carpenter in England but with a few crucial differences. Critically, the roughing joiner is responsible for insulating and plasterboarding, trades which in England would be carried out by separate subcontractors. Because of this, and because of the way the Scots timber frame house builders supply their kits, the installation of room partition walls is kept back in the build process till after the external walls and ceilings are boarded, and this saves a huge amount of time spent nailing-in supporting noggins. The wall and ceiling junction details are thus streamlined and simplified, but it only makes sense if all this work is carried out by one team — hence the broader skillset of the Scot’s roughing joiner.
However, in England, the trades remain more narrowly defined — Carpenters deal with wood, tackers with plasterboard — and thus one of the major benefits deriving from switching to timber frame construction is lost.
Sitting on the minibus as we travelled between sites, Stewart Dalgarno, current chairman of the UKTFA, sketched out on a sheet of A4 the essential differences between the Scottish and English methods of joining walls together. The English method involved over 40 operations for each junction: the Scots have streamlined that down to less than ten. Multiply that by the 20 or 30 similar junctions found in every unit built, and the cost saving can be measured in four figures.
For Dalgarno, this lesson has become a bit of a personal bugbear. He has spent his life working for Stewart Milne, Scotland’s largest timber frame supplier, and has overseen their expansion into England by heading up their plant in Witney, Oxfordshire. There has been no shortage of English housebuilders wanting to try Stewart Milne’s timber frame kits, but few of them have grasped the lessons to be had from the Scottish experience. To get the full benefit of offsite construction methods, you have to re-engineer the onsite processes as well, and often this means rationalising away the traditional craft-based approach to building and encouraging multi-tasking.
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