Residential Timber Framing and Trusses

About this course.

Timber is used to frame the great majority of Australian houses because it is strong for its weight, widely available, renewable, easy to cut and fix with common tools, and well suited to the light, repetitive framing that a house needs. A light-timber-framed house is essentially a skeleton of relatively small timber members spaced closely together, working as a system rather than as a few heavy beams. The main parts are the subfloor and floor frame that the house sits on, the wall frames that enclose and divide it and carry loads down, and the roof frame that spans the top and sheds weather. Understanding how these parts relate — and how timber itself behaves — is the foundation for everything that follows.

Timber's appeal as a framing material begins with its strength-to-weight ratio. It carries useful loads without being heavy, so members can be handled by hand, lifted into place and fixed quickly, which suits the economics of housing. It is a renewable resource, and structural timber for framing is produced to defined structural grades so that its expected strength and stiffness are known and can be relied upon in design. It works readily with saws, nail guns, screws and connectors, and it tolerates the ordinary adjustments of site work. These practical qualities, more than any single structural advantage, are why light timber framing became and remains the default system for Australian homes.