Timber Framing at new Cherry Republic building

By Jane Greiner
Sun staff writer
The timber framing for the supporting walls of the new building at Cherry Republic went up in just one day. Robert Foulkes and his crew of six, from White Oak Timber Framers of Suttons Bay assembled, hoisted, braced, pushed and pounded the tree-sized components into place. “Handy Randy” Weirich, the Cherry Republic carpenter, was also on site lending a hand wherever needed.

Raising and positioning the pre-assembled roof trusses was expected to take one more day before construction of the new building could continue.
Timber framing, also called post and beam construction, is unusual in modern buildings. Each timber is hewn from a single tree. All the timbers making up the structure are connected with mortise and tenon joints and pegged together with wooden pins.
When completed, the building will house a new Cherry Republic retail store that will be 30 percent larger than the current store, according to Wendy DesAutels, Art Director at Cherry Republic. It will replace the old makeshift structure, which housed offices, a storeroom and racks of t-shirts.
“As we grow our first priority is to continue improvements to our Glen Arbor property,” DesAutels said. The idea is to make Cherry Republic “a destination, a place people drive to Glen Arbor to visit, not just happen to stumble on.”
In addition to the new building the crew will do some elaborate landscaping. They plan to include a quiet space where people can sit and read, a fun place for cherry pit spitting, and an expanded garden.
The garden, which has been the passion of President Bob Sutherland’s wife’s Amy since the beginning, will also be expanded. “She will probably have people to help her maintain the garden,” DesAutels said, “but it will always be Amy’s garden.”
DesAutels said they would like one day to see Cherry Republic become a gathering place in Glen Arbor similar to a town square.
When the new building opens for business, the current store will become a new cherry beverage store featuring cherry wines, cherry juice, cherry cider and an extended line of Boom Chugga Lugga Cherries Soda Pop.
Controller Todd Ciolek volunteered interesting information about the four trusses that will span the sidewalls and tie the structure together. They are called scissor trusses because of the way the beams criss-cross. The trusses are so big and heavy, Ciolek said, that you need special overload trucks to carry them and special permits to haul them on the roads. “Just one truss weighs more than all the wood you see out there today,” he said.
One of the reasons Cherry Republic chose timber frame construction was because it wanted a nice open feel, DesAutels said. Timber framing creates large open buildings because the big exterior wall timbers carry the load.
The new building will have a huge skylight on the peak for a lot of natural light. The floor will be a combination of stone and wood with in-floor radiant heat.
Another “neat feature” DesAutel mentioned is the helical pile foundation used for the building. This method allows building without digging deep foundations, which can destroy nearby tree root systems. The helical pile is like a screw. It spirals down 8-12 feet and supports and stabilizes the foundation, which can then be very shallow. There are eight of these piles supporting the foundation of the new building. Their use saves several huge, old trees surrounding the building.
Timber framer Robert Foulkes, the owner and operator of White Oak Timber Framers of Suttons Bay, was on-site supervising the construction. He uses all Michigan wood in his framing.
Foulkes has been building timber-frame structures for 27 years. He started out with a degree in filmmaking but went into timber-frame construction because he had to make a living. He found it to be creative, “like a sculpture,” and he also retains fond memories of playing in timber framed barns as a kid. “They’re just beautiful,” he said.
Over the years Foulkes claims to have built “houses, barns, banks, bordellos, bomb shelters and wineries.” His company did the timber framing for the Boskydel and L. Maube wineries here in Leelanau County.
For most of his timber-framing Foulkes uses Michigan white oak. His crew prepares the posts and beams at his Suttons Bay site and shapes the mortise (slots) and tenons (ends). The pieces are then hauled to the building site and assembled there. The mortise and tenon joints are slid together on site and everything is locked in place with wooden pegs or trunnels.
The pins come from Pin Oak trees, Foulkes said. Pin Oaks have branch tips that grow unusually straight. The dead tips are harvested for the building pins and that’s why the trees are called Pin Oakes. The wooden pins are all handmade.
The roof beams used in the trusses are tapered beams. They are 8” X 14” thick at the base where they carry most of the load. At the top, where the roof carries much less weight, they narrow to 8” x 8” square. Trusses are assembled off-site and trucked in.
The entire frame is fitted together and raised on site before the wooden pins are driven in.
Foulkes said that timber framing is an ancient form of construction. “It’s indigenous all over the world,” he said, “some Native Americans use it, the English use it, the Japanese, the Norwegians, everybody.”
One Native American tribe in Canada has timber frame houses that they build and live in, then take apart, move, and put together again twice every year, according to Foulkes. Because they are held together with the pins, the structures are simple to disassemble and reassemble.
President Bob Sutherland says Cherry Republic started using timber construction at least eight years ago with the logs in the old store and cherry beams in the café.
He thinks timber frame buildings make the best show of a natural Michigan architecture style and also of the Cherry Republic style.
“My goal over the next five years is to make Cherry Republic look like it’s been around for 500 years. And one of the ways to do that is with stone and timber construction,” he said.
“One of the fun things about the new building is that it’s going to have a bench all around the inside,” Sutherland said. The first timber that supports the entire building will be a beam so wide that you can sit on it. It will run around the entire building on the inside.
There will be stone seating on the outside. The dolomite stone for the project is coming form a quarry in Cooks, Michigan (just west of Manistique) on the garden peninsula.
The “cool” thing is that the quarry owner, an 86 year-old man, has offered to sell the quarry to Sutherland. Though he hasn’t made the transition from cherries to boulders, the Cherry Republic president has purchased a tractor from him, and several members of the Cherry Republic staff will travel up to Cooks to get some rocks. “We’ll be playing Barney Rubble and Fred Flintstone up there,” Sutherland said. The stone will be used for landscaping and on the outside of the building foundation.
The new building will also feature a super-efficient boiler made in France. Sutherland said it looks like a car engine and will run on natural gas.
“One of the things I’m really hoping to accomplish with the building is that layered timber effect like they have in England,” he said.
Sutherland hopes to get that “super 3-d effect” in the exposed beams of the roof structure of the new building so the visitor will see four layers of timbers.
When a timber frame building is completed, a pine bough is traditionally placed on one end of the ridgepole. It resembles a Christmas tree and remains up there until the roof is put on. “When our building is finished, we are going to have a pine bough at one end and a cherry bough at the other,” Sutherland said.
The new building should be ready for a Grand Opening in the summer of 2004.In the meantime, people can walk in anytime to see what’s going on.
The public is also invited to a special opening on Sunday, June 29th of the Farmland Preservation exhibit, which will be housed in the new building. The show is dedicated to saving Northern Michigan’s fruit farms and features “massive” photos, and a video on hard working farm families and the struggle to keep farm and orchard land from being swallowed up by developments.