Design and Engineering

• Customized plans designed from your wish list . . . on budget
• Preliminary plans through to permit and detailed final construction plans
• Design flexibility and sound engineering

Tamlin’s experienced in-house design staff can help turn your home ideas into a reality. Our design specialty is custom residential homes and cottages but our flexible approach and experience has seen the completion of a wide range of buildings, including retirement homes, island getaway cabins, resort area or remote island homes and cottages, commercial motels, hotels, pensions, bed & breakfasts, and recreational buildings. Our distinctive west coast style features the use of douglas fir and western red cedar.

. . . Working with Tamlin has been a truly wonderful experience . . . Your architectural and engineering drawings gave us exactly what we wanted . . .
— George Heim

Preliminary Plans, Permit Plans, and Construction Plans After meeting with you in person, or reviewing your project by phone and email, our objective is to thoroughly understand your dreams and design objectives. Many of our clients have spent months or years collecting sample plans, or have hand sketched their own plans. Some have worked with designers to rough out floor plans and elevations. Others have reviewed our sample plans and prefer to modify them. For those who have built homes before and therefore need less help at this stage, we help you refine your drawings—so you won’t make the same mistakes this time! During this phase, a wish list is formulated along with a vision of the finished building.

After we understand your design criteria, we can help speed up and simplify the design process by quickly producing a professionally customized design home for you. The first step is to work on conceptual and/or preliminary plans, which are later taken to full permit and construction drawings.

Here are some general items covered in the preliminary drawing stage.

• Your wish list for architectural appearance, design, rooms (kitchen, great room, master bedroom, etc.), function, size, and budget—all to suit your lifestyle needs.
• Lot configuration, lot size, and topography (sloped, flat, uneven, rocky, trees, hillside, streams, drainage, soil conditions, etc.).
• House size and positioning on lot to take advantage of views and direction of sun (north, south, east, west).
• Review of building restrictions such as setbacks, easements, covenants, code issues, etc.
• Other design factors such as entry access (driveway, front, side and/or rear), decks, patios (shade in the afternoon), fireplace, barrier-free construction for disabled or future wheelchair access, environmental or green building.

Then a Preliminary Plan is drawn:

• Preliminary plans include floor plans, elevations, and sections through the house, and may include 3D structural perspectives for log or timber frame designs.
• Optional Archi-CAD 3D color perspectives or simplified 3D details.

Archi-CAD Rendering (Optional)

Depending on the complexity of your building and site conditions, a site visit may be recommended. Preliminary plans for your home may take 2-3 weeks on smaller houses or 2-3 months on larger custom houses.

After your final house package order has been confirmed with Tamlin, the Permit Plans and Construction Plans are drawn up. Our final plans are known for their detailed information and clarity:

• Permit plans include foundation plans, floor plans (basement, 1F, 2F), elevations (N,S, E,W), section drawings, and relevant structural details. A revised lot plan showing house position, setbacks, easements, etc. and/or surveyed drawings (not included) may be required. Engineered drawings are also provided as per local building requirements.
• Construction plans include all the above and many more details for the builder, enabling fast and smooth construction. These typically include floor joist layouts, plywood subfloor layouts, roof framing layouts, roof board layouts, gable wall framing layouts, individual wall framing layouts (optional), and even a door and window schedule (identifying exact locations, sizes and rough openings). Also included is our easy to follow Bill of Materials which itemizes each component in the house package, specifies quantities, lengths, sizes, and provides key building notations to make construction easier and organized.
• For timber frame houses, we also include 3D structural drawings, identifying each numbered timber component for easy assembly on site.
• For our milled log houses, we include a log construction manual, and individual log wall assembly drawings.

Detailed Materials Lists
CAD Drawings	3D Structural Perspective
Final Construction Plans	Laminated Plans for Site

Design Within Your Budget

Whether building an 800 square foot cottage or an 8,000 square foot hybrid timber frame house, Tamlin keeps you on track to meet your budget throughout the entire design process.

• With our general contracting experience and knowledge of both materials and building costs, we balance your design with your budget. Total costs are a function of design, materials, and labour, and we can recommend the right mix. For example, locating a bathroom near, beside, or above a kitchen will reduce plumbing installation costs.
• Unlike so many over-designed house projects, your Tamlin plan will be the dream home you can afford. We design to maximize livable space and, in many cases, can lower building costs by redesigning your house to utilize floor space more efficiently. It could be as simple as adding storage space under the stairs or eliminating excessive hallway space—without compromising those important spacious great rooms or loft spaces.

Design Flexibility

Our hybrid approach to design allows you the most flexibility in design. We approach every project on an individual basis and recommend specific designs for you. We often combine different building features such as hand hewn log accents with conventional wood frame or timber frame buildings, or solid douglas fir decorative timbers with our 6x8 milled “D” log.

The Tamlin approach also means flexibility to combine other building methods such as panelized walls, SIPs (structural insulated panels), and ICF (insulated concrete forms). Our design system enables us to provide numerous styles and sizes of buildings for homeowners, builders, and architects.

Engineering and Design Quality

. . . I can't help but mention that your level of quality is among the best I have seen.  — Robert D. Jirava, P.Eng/Struct.Eng.

All detailed drawings are checked and certified for structural integrity by our engineer(s). And depending on your location in Canada, the USA, or overseas, we can also work with a local engineer who can stamp the drawings to ensure your house meets all local building code requirements.

Our location on the west coast of Canada makes us familiar with earthquake codes and other requirements (snowloads, windloads, etc.), so we appreciate the importance of working with a professional engineer who is an expert on your local building area. We encourage direct contact with engineers, builders, and carpenters to clarify our methods or adopt their local recommendations.

Tamlin takes pride in the many homes we’ve built in countries all around the world and understand each project comes with its own particular climactic concerns such as hot and humid, freezing cold, or hurricane prone.

We take care to design with carpenters in mind because we know that the final quality of your house is a combination of the best materials and installation. We know carpenters will review drawn details on paper yet have a tendency to leave manuals to the end. So we provide drawn explanatory details whenever possible. These include such items as rainscreen design for optimal moisture protection on exterior walls, roof details with adequate overhangs—and even providing galvanized nails for our cedar sidings so the cedar tannins does not react with the nails and leave stains on the wood.