Tremblant Lifestyle

A photographic montage of our many visits to the area of Mont tremblant, specifically Lac Gauthier where our favorite lakeside house (La Brunante) draws us back year after year.

me and my friends went with ski travel to mt tremblant in canada for our senior year ski trip… this is a video that me and my friend matt made of the very end of us in the room and us ice skating

i have recieved my t4 and the revenu quebec version as well. Whats the best way for me to complete my tax return? DIY it or use a company??

A short, fun video of some friends skiing at the Mont tremblant Resort in the Laurentian Mountains, north of montreal, quebec Canada.

http://www.crystal-inn.com

For inquiries or reservations, you may contact us at 819-681-7775 or by email at : bbcrystalinn@gmail.com

Mont-tremblant is a village and incorporated municipality in th…

quebec Part 3 Mount tremblant Vacation August 1998

Developement tremblant Nord is a unique land development project centered on authentic country living, with over 2,000 acres of forested land in the Tremblant region of quebec. Each plot averages b…

A timber frame home provides its owners with a whole list of benefits. In no particular order, here are a few:  Beauty, strength, design flexibility, energy efficiency, quicker build times, and increased resale values.

In Canada we have a rich tradition of building with wood, especially in provinces like British Columbia, Ontario and quebec where a vibrant forestry industry has been a major engine in their respective economies for centuries.  Who wouldn’t want the warmth, grace and character of heavy timbers on the inside of their home?  Enter timber framing, one of the oldest methods of building in the world, which involves the use of heavy timbers joined together with furniture-like mortise & tenon joinery, and hardwood pegs.

On top of providing beauty and warmth to a home, the sheer size of the timbers makes the home very study and long lasting – existing timber frames in Europe have been around for over 800 years.  As well as strength, you get design flexibility from a post and beam home.  Due to the fact that the large posts in the home take all the vertical loads, interior partition walls can be placed anywhere – or not at all – depending on how open a floor-plan you want.

The last major benefit of timber frames homes comes in the form of energy efficiency.  The walls and roof system are built around the timber structure, providing clients with an uninterrupted thermal envelope, full of insulation, instead of structural members.  It’s the timber structure on the inside that resists dead and live loads, which allows increased levels of insulation inside the walls.

Finally, with all the craftsmanship and high quality materials found in timber frame homes, it’s no wonder that they consistently out-price similarly sized conventional homes when it comes time to put them on the real-estate market.  With all the benefits associated with timber framing, wouldn’t it make sense to consider it the next time you build?

It’s not uncommon to see claims in our industry that timber frame structures and the wall & roof panels used to enclose them are green and sustainable – but is this really the case?  I thought it would be interesting to look a bit deeper into these questions to try to uncover the facts.

The timber frame structure

A timber frame is made from solid wood, which is sustainable… right?  Well, not all timbers used for timber framing are necessarily sustainable.  Sustainable forestry, in an oversimplified manner of speaking, means that the volume of wood in the forest does not go down over time as a result of logging practices, or a particular resource will not be harvested to extinction.  It may go up or down in individual years, but over time the resource will be there in perpetuity.

When huge “free-of-heart-center” Douglas fir timbers are specified for a timber frame project, as is now popular, these timbers will come from enormous old growth trees, on Canada and America’s west coast.   These trees are a limited resource – once they are full harvested, they are gone forever.  A more sustainable timber would be a younger, smaller, possibly plantation grown Douglas fir timber, that is “boxed-heart” – meaning a smaller and younger tree can be used.

Another factor to consider is the embodied energy in the timber, or the energy it takes to harvest, transform and transport the timber to its final location.  If a timber is harvested locally, squared up on a mill and used “green” (not dried), it has very little embodied energy.  A practice now gaining popularity is to have the timbers kiln dried in a special energy-intensive kiln.  Add this drying energy to the cost of transporting the west coast timbers all over North America, and the embodied energy goes up quickly.  Not as much as steel or concrete perhaps, but a lot more than local green timber.  We always encourage our clients here in quebec and Ontario to use local, green, boxed-heart timbers for their timber frame projects.

Insulated wall and roof panels

A product that has become synonymous with timber framing is the foam based stress-skinned panel used to form the walls and roof envelope.  Available in either EPS or urethane foam, the panel does a great job of insulating the home, so it’s often touted as being very green.  While it’s true that lowering energy consumption is part of a green home, using petroleum based products is clearly not sustainable.  When you look at the larger context and the amount of energy used by the petroleum industry, including CO2 emissions, you have to question the green label it has been given.  Foam panels are also quite wasteful, as roughly 20% of the walls panels will be cut out and put in a landfill as a result of window and door openings.

A more sustainable insulation material would be cellulose, straw or even mineral wool.  Cellulose is made from 85% recycled newsprint, and does a great job sealing walls and roofs against air infiltration.  Straw is an agricultural by-product, and also has a great R-value.  Even mineral or rock wool, which technically comes from non-sustainable minerals, can be made from recycled iron slag, which is a by-product of iron and steel making.

So if there is one message to take from this article it’s this: do your homework. Don’t always take the claims of manufacturers at face value, as products often have undesirable qualities that don’t get mentioned in advertising taglines.

RDA-DVD-1055 – Mont tremblant quebec From the Producer of the Television Series: Goodtimes Travel, Destinations & Travel, Travel Featuring: Winter and Summer in Mont-Tremblant, skiing, hiking, biking, Golfing, St-Jovite Gardens, Canada’s longest linear park and much more…