By Deane Erts

Although the company is headquartered here, its building sites span the nation and may be found internationally as well; and the reason is as simple as the principle on which the construction is based— well crafted wooden homes have an appeal that conjures mental images of the warmth of an open hearth and the strength of hand-hewn beams fashioned by our frontier forbearers.

But don’t look for any mud plugging the chinks in walls erected by Bob Sternquist’s company. Heartwood Homes look like the summer or winter retreats of royalty. The precision-fitted joints do not allow even sunlight through, let alone a draft, and the floors are as likely to be marble as maple. Sternquist and the members of his crews are craftsmen of the old school, but they don’t shun high-tech innovations that will make the homes they build state-of-the-art in energy efficiency.

Timberframe homes are not the typical log cabin by any stretch of the imagination. They are not constructed entirely of wooden beams; only the framework is made of solid 10” by 10” beams hewn from a variety of solid woods. The beams are joined by a method that has been used for centuries known as a mortise-and-tenon joint, which simply means that a hole is chiseled in a beam and the other beam that is to be joined is whittled down at the end to fit in the hole of the first beam.

This type of joint is quite secure on its own, however, craftsmen learned long ago that the joint could be locked by boring a hole through both beams at the fitted joint and pinning the juncture with one or more wooden pegs, making a stable union between the two beams that will last for centuries, literally.