We’re going to build a house. And by “build”, we mean hands-on construction. Building a house is a complicated and involved task, and if you ask anyone they’ll tell you that it can only be done by trained professionals. But if you break down any complicated procedure into smaller steps, you’ll find a level that can be understood. Break down the process of building a house into it’s components and you find that there’s little that defies understanding. Choose a style of construction that is more easily broken into components and this process gets simpler.
Timber Frame for the house
And thus to timber framing. Specifically, post-and-beam. In a “bricks and mortar” or stud-framed house, the walls serve a dual purpose of providing structural form, and sealing out the elements. In a post-and-beam house, the wooden skeleton provides the structure. Weather sealing is then attached to or built around it. This separation of functionality makes the design process much less complex and allows clear division of tasks. We can farm out the design and engineering of the structural frame and take responsibility for the walls, which themselves only need to support the windows, and the roof, which again is supported by the timber frame.
Keep breaking a project down enough and you’ll get it down to manageable chunks. Building a two storey brick house seems daunting, but laying a single brick doesn’t. And all buildings can ultimately be reduced to some kind of “brick”.