Worcester
Few shots from one of our Worcestershire teams’ previous projects; a sorry old elm timber frame which unfortunately needed a lot of replacement, we managed to salvage a couple timbers which the architect’s spec thought were a write off.
The framing here tells us a story of a couple of phases of construction throughout the last 3-400years. The original gable frame being much lower than the current arrangement. At some point the roof was raised to accommodate a second floor, often when this happens the historical carpenters would leave the original wall framing intact and build up off the existing wall plate with short studs and another wall plate, in this instance they went to the effort of re-build the wall with full length studs, except for the cross frame/bay posts which had short and crude extensions of the original post. Unfortunately, this arrangement hadn’t done too well and also involved removing parts of the tie beam. For structural reasons, we chose to go with a full-length, solid bay post, picking up the old tie and extending to pick up the higher wall plate rather than replicating the bodgey detail which existed previously. Shout out to the framers on site, lots of hard points to hit with those bay posts, 1 measurement or angle off and it all goes to pot.
Elm frames are unfortunately nowhere near as resilient as their oak counterparts, so when those incompatible modern materials have been used they really do end up being the nails in the coffin for large sections of the frame. If you have an elm frame, please look after it!







