AMERICAN DREAM COMES TRUE FOR FAMILY

The home's frame was built in Macon, Mo., and shipped to Cape County on trailer trucks.

Angular notches and wooden pegs are all that is needed to give a mortise and tenon home its incredible strength.

Rick Martin views an exposed roof truss in his family's timber frame home.

It is called the American Dream -- to own a home. But for Rick Martin and members of his family, there is something more to it than that.

Martin is now closing out the fifth month in what is expected to be a year-long process to construct his home, the product of several years of dreaming and planning, the end of which will see three generations of his family come together under one roof.

He said the desire to build the home came about with the illness of his elderly mother, Florence Martin, who is now confined to a wheelchair. When Martin saw the toll the illness was taking on both of his parents, he decided to construct a home that the whole family could live in and allow him to provide better care to both of his parents.

"I wanted to build this because my parents are not in the best of health," Rick Martin explained. "We just decided to all go in together and build a home and live together rather than live apart and have to put my parents in a nursing home when they got older.

"I always used to watch "The Waltons" on television," he added, "and I liked that family style of living. It's kind of like, 'We all have our problems but we can work them out.'"

With his decision, Martin set to work designing a comfortable home for the whole family, including his parents, his wife Jean and his daughter Brandy.

What a year's design work yielded was something unique and something which would be constructed in a manner not seen in this part of the country since perhaps the 1930s.

Viewing the home from nearby Route Y in northern Cape Girardeau, one is immediately struck by the home's size. Even the distance created by the deep hollow and high slope which separate the construction site from Highway Y does not hide the building's size. The home is located in a new rural development known as Plantation Oaks.

Crossing the hollow by a narrow dirt road and arriving at the top of the slope upon which the home rests, visitors are again taken aback, but this time by the lumber used to frame the structure.

None of the typical two-by-four panel framing can be found. The lumber used here consists of full-fledged wooden beams -- six-by-eight and eight-by-ten inch red and white oak beams cut from the heart of the tree.

The differences don't end there. These monster timbers are joined not with nails but by the strength of square and V-shaped notches cut into each timber to help them fit together in much the same way that the teeth of cogs fit together.

This type of construction, known as mortise and tenon building, is rarely encountered today, seen by many as a novelty, and done by only a few craftsmen in the country.

"Mortise" refers to the carefully-cut joints which are used to join timbers in a remarkably strong manner. The word "tenon" refers to the wooden pegs, an average of an inch thick, which are used to hold the joined timbers tight when they are being lifted into place. Mortise and tenon buildings derive much of their incredible strength from the integrity of these mortised joints.

"It's definitely a totally different type of construction," agreed Rick Martin. "This is the mother of all houses, built the way houses used to be built."

Martin had originally hoped to construct a log home but the cost was too high. When explaining the current construction to others, he finds that he has a hard time convincing people that he's not constructing a log cabin.

"When I try to explain it to most people, they say, "Oh, it's a log home," he laughed. "No. It's a timber frame home."

With the decision to go to timber framing, Martin started his design and after over a year of work, he submitted it to Allan Judy of Heirloom Handcrafting of Macon, Mo. Judy's company specializes in the construction of timber frame homes.

Martin and Judy worked for a little less than a year to make adjustments to the design after which Judy began a year of "construction" in his Macon facility.

Martin said Judy was accustomed to building much smaller homes.

"Allan told me that he can usually make three homes a year but mine alone took a whole year," said Martin.

Judy and his workers hand cut each timber used to frame the home. The also hand sized each of the mortise joints and tenons used.

Once completed in April, the timbers were trucked on three tractor trailers to the construction site, where Martin and the friends he is employing had cleared the area and dug the full basement.

For the ensuing six days, Martin, Judy and other workers erected the structure using two cranes to lift the heavy beams and trusses into place.

With the job completed, Martin set about to fit the outer walls and construct everything inside the home. He is acting as his own contractor on the project, with the assistance of father-in-law Lewis Rogers, himself a contractor for over 40 years.

Although the home may be built in an 18th century manner, it's not short of modern touches. Joined to the outer timber frames will be what are called "stressed skin panels."

The technolically advanced panels, approximately six inches in thickness, consist of a layer of styrofoam insulation sandwiched between layers of wood fiber panel and sheet rock. The comparatively slimmer panels replace the plywood, insulation and sheet rock employed in conventional construction and will make the home so energy efficient, it is estimated to require only about one-third the heating and cooling energy of a conventional structure.

Martin is proud of the fact that both the timbers and stressed skin panels are Missouri products.

Once finished, the home will comprise 14,700 square feet of space along with a 2,200 square foot deck. Included in the plans are a great room, living room, kitchen, three-car garage, seven bedrooms, eight to nine bathrooms and a full basement which is to include a playroom, storage and a large woodworking shop.

Nelson Martin, Rick's father, laughs when asked what he thinks of the new home.

"I think it's a monster," he said.

The elder Martin said moving into the home, which should be completed after the first of the year, will be a homecoming of sorts. He was born about two miles away from the new home near the north Cape County hamlet of Leemon.

When Nelson Martin was about 16, he and his father constructed a barn using mortise and tenon joinery. The barn still stands.