MORE than two years ago, Monique Beaumont trusted her company partner's opinion enough to purchase an English timber frame barn sight-unseen and ship it back to Alberta as her future residence.
"I made a very quick decision -- like in 15 minutes -- that I would buy it," says Beaumont. "It's quite hard to get buildings that are still standing like this and are (still) in use."
Beaumont is a junior partner in Uniquities Architectural Antiques & Salvage, a Calgary company that imports items from around the world.
When Uniquities co-owner Julia Shantz first saw the mid-17th century timber frame barn near Wales, she knew it was special -- and that it had to come home with her. A deal she arranged with a West Coast customer to buy the structure fell through, and Beaumont was her first call directly from England to remedy the situation.
Shipping items from England in 12-metre containers is commonplace to Beaumont and Shantz, but what to do with the hefty pieces of the 22.5-foot by 85.5-foot timber frame barn once it arrived was slightly out of their realm of knowledge.
Beaumont contacted Crazy Creek Timber Frames Ltd. in Okotoks, Alta., for help. Marla Brown, co-owner of Crazy Creek with husband Rod, responded eagerly.
"Finally, we get to prove to people what we've been telling them all along: timber frame can always be resurrected; it can have many lives and it really lasts a long time," Marla Brown recalls thinking after taking Beaumont's call.
Rod Brown and his crew took on the hefty task of sorting out the mishmash of items within the shipping container.
"We wanted to put the whole thing up and take care of any problems here (on Crazy Creek's property)," he says. "It was a real puzzle to try to sort all the pieces out."
Most pieces had been marked by those who took the barn down in England, but many of the plastic labels had broken off during transport or were mislabelled. Brown and his crew referred to wall-by-wall drawings and multiple photographs of the intact frame provided as an assembly guide.
"We called it forensic timber framing for quite a while," says Brown, noting they spent much time matching knots and chisel marks on the oak pieces to those in the pictures.
A few modifications -- an interior wall, fireplace, loft and dormer -- will be made to Beaumont's future part-time residence, scheduled to ship to her southern Alberta property later this month.
An engineer has also directed the Browns to add a structural exterior wall around the timber frame, as the integrity of the centuries-old wood is uncertain. But the thick oak posts, beams and trusses will be fully visible from inside when the structure is completed in a few months by Crazy Creek.
"The interior is another story. I don't expect it will be finished for years," says Beaumont. "There are lots of unknowns and I'm in no rush."
Right now, Beaumont is simply excited about maintaining the structural integrity of such a historical building and the thought of eventually passing this home on to future generations of her family.
(See uniquities.ca and crazy-creek.ab.ca for more information; as a guide, one quote for a 25-foot by 25-foot 17th-century timber structure to be bought and shipped to Canada from England came in at $80,000 to $95,000. Uniquities can also import individual structural elements, rather than entire buildings.)
-- Postmedia News
