26'x40' Barn Style Ecolog Home Vancouver Island

Early spring 2013 a client wanted to build his dream home and decided to build an Ecolog home. After several months of planning, he decided on the floor plan and style of home he wanted to build: An Ecolog Home with 26'x40' footprint and a Gambrel style roof (also called "Barn style" roof).

This is the first Ecolog home with such a roof - we were all very curious as to how it would look. In May 2013 we started creating the detailed blueprints. The 3D model, created as part of the design process, confirmed that the combination of the Ecolog walls and a Gambrel roof looks fantastic.

In addition to the main house a garage was built as a similar looking Ecolog building. To keep the height of this secondary building in line with municipal laws, the garage roof was designed as a standard 6:12 pitched truss roof.

In September 2013 the construction crew was assembled and they started to build. The owner selected Randy Churchill, an experienced timberframe builder, as his main contractor. 

Randy and his team are very skilled in working with all types of wood. The Ecolog kit was first delivered to their timberframe shop. There, they pre-processed all timbers to minimize the assembly time at the construction site. Using this approach, the garage walls were assembled on site in just over 1 day. 

Construction of the larger main house, of course, took longer. In December 2013 the home was close to "lockup stage", and all framing was done. For the main house they added many design details like the post/beam connections in traditional tenon/mortise style.

This home is also a nice example for an energy efficient design. First projections of Christi Sacht, the energy advisor for this project, showed that the home may get an Energuide Rating of 82 - 83 (final numbers to be determined later after the blower door test). Such a high rating will qualify the owner to receive special rebates for highly energy efficient homes, but more importantly this will save him thousands of dollar in heating costs in years to come.