Guides · Flathead Valley, MT
What a timber frame package actually costs
How much does a timber frame package cost?
Nobody publishes this number, which is why you’re reading a page about it. Here are two of ours.
The Shire is 12,000 square feet over three stories. The timber package came to just under two million dollars. McDaniels is just shy of 11,000 square feet. Its timber package was a little over a million.
Roughly a thousand square feet apart, and nearly a million dollars apart on timber alone.
What that number is, and what it isn’t
A timber package is the wood showing up. Cut, shaped, delivered, sitting on the ground waiting for a crew. It is not the framing labor. It is not the conventional lumber, the trusses, the sheathing, or the roof. When someone quotes you a timber package, they are quoting the material — and on a house at this level that material arrives on its own trucks and gets set with a crane.
So the first thing to be clear about: a two million dollar timber package is not a two million dollar frame, and it is nowhere near the cost of the house.
What actually moves the number
Square footage is the number people reach for, and it is close to useless here. What drives a timber package is the design of the timber itself.
Spans. The single biggest factor. A beam carrying a long clear span has to be sized for that span, and past a certain point no lumber yard stocks anything close. Those beams get cut to order, and the largest ones come out of specialist mills. On our jobs the beams are large because the houses are designed to span crazy long distances — that is the whole point of the architecture, and it is what you are paying for.
Complexity of the joinery and the shapes. Straight timbers are one thing. On Scotty’s — just under 7,000 square feet — the design called for rounded timber work, which meant a custom mill out of town bending wood with steam and thousands of pounds of pressure. That is not a material you order from a catalog. It is a process, and it is priced like one.
How much of it is exposed. Timber that will be seen is selected, finished, and handled differently from timber that disappears into a wall.
What to do with this if you’re planning a build
Two honest takeaways.
First, ask what is in the number you’re being quoted. Package, or package and set? Delivered, or delivered and craned? Those are very different figures and they get used loosely.
Second, if the budget matters, the timber design is where to have the conversation — early, with the architect and the framer in the same room. By the time the drawings are final, the spans are decided, and the spans have decided most of the cost.
We’re happy to look at a set of plans and tell you what the timber side of it is going to mean. That conversation is free and it is a lot cheaper than finding out later.
Quick answers
- What is a timber package?
- The timbers themselves — cut, shaped, and delivered to the site. It does not include the framing labor, the conventional lumber, the roof system, or anything that happens after the truck arrives.
- Does a bigger house mean a bigger timber package?
- Not reliably. On two of our houses, a 12,000 square foot job carried a timber package of almost two million dollars while a just-under-11,000 square foot job carried just over one million. The difference was the timber design, not the square footage.
- Why are custom timbers so expensive?
- Spans. Long clear spans need beams that no yard stocks, so they are cut to order, and the largest ones come from specialist mills. Curved or steam-bent work is milled to order as well.
Got a set of plans?
We'll look at them and tell you what the framing side of it actually means — timber, schedule, and what we'd want to know before quoting it.