Valley man sees myriad uses for housing kits

MEADOW LAKES — It’s not unusual for companies to sell kits folks assemble to build large, complex things.

There are airplanes that come in kits. Robots. Even things like sheds and floating docks.

But Dan Brown, who, with a partner, has started a company he calls Nuchek Structures, said he thinks he’s the first person who has found a way to do that with timber-frame buildings, like cabins, houses, barns — anything you need.

“It’s just like a model or an erector set,” he said.

Well, slightly more complicated than that, but not by much.

“Any knucklehead with a wrench can tighten it up, square up a building, put the panels on it,” Brown said.

The buildings can also be assembled and hauled to where they need to go, like prefabricated buildings are for work camps on the North Slope and in other far-flung Alaska places. The kits, Brown said, are the type of thing a guy could get his buddies and a half rack of beer together and put up on some remote property over a weekend.

Brown said he’s able to achieve that kind of ease of construction because he’s stripped the home down to its barest essentials. Using pre-insulated wall panels means a person doesn’t need to mess with installing installation or putting up a vapor barrier. And it’s just the structure — things like cabinets, interior walls, plumbing, electricity and heating would take a bit longer.

The buildings are timber-frame, meaning that timbers in the exterior walls support the structure. Traditional wood-frame homes use smaller lumber and rely on interior walls for some support.

Though Brown might quibble with using the word “traditional” to describe a wood-frame house, he said timber-frame construction has been around for thousands of years, but wood frame came about at around the time when lumber started being made in standard sizes. He’d peg that at about the time of the Great Depression.

“They got away from the craftsmanship of timberframe construction,” Brown said.

Where his design differs from old-school timber-frame construction is in the brackets he’s designed. Timber-frame homes, at least the ones built hundreds of years ago, were constructed without nails or screws. They used wooden joints instead. Brown uses brackets to join the pieces together.

“That’s kind of the keystone to the system,” he said. “It’s just bringing today’s technology into a simplistic form of construction.”

He started on this odyssey probably two years ago. He went through some trying times. His dad got sick and Brown stopped working to take care of him. By the time his dad passed on he was surviving on unemployment checks.

But having all that time around the house allowed him to start thinking about timber-frame construction. Brown’s training is as an electrician and he’s been a contractor and project manager. His dad was a civil engineer.

At some point caring for his dad he pulled out drawings he’d made for a timber-frame cabin. He came up with the bracket idea and showed it to his dad.

“He was laid up for awhile and I told him what I had in mind and showed him the idea and drew it all out with him,” Brown said. “He said, ‘you could do work camps you could do modular buildings.’”

Brown said that’s where he’d like to see this concept land. He thinks it has great potential for work camps, but also for disaster relief and housing in rural Alaska.

He thinks there is a lot of benefit to this type of construction in those settings. For one thing, because they’re so simple to put together, there wouldn’t be a need to send a lot of contractors and engineers out to the village. People could be hired locally with the relevant skills.

Brown said he’s aware of how grand those ambitions sound, but he wouldn’t be selling it as that kind of an idea if he hadn’t gotten such positive reactions when he’s pitched it. Nuchek had a booth at last summer’s Alaska State Fair. The booth was basically his prototype; the first timber-frame he built with this design. It’s now his office.

The booth was packed, Brown said, for the whole fair. Contractors would come in and say things like, “anyone could do this.”

Brown’s answer? That’s kind of the point. That’s when people would start to see the potential. At that point they’d sometimes say, something like, “I could’ve come up with this.”

Brown’s answer? But you didn’t.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.