I have recently completed building a holiday home at Kenton-on-Sea using Ian Smit of PE Timber Homes. It has been an absolute pleasure working with Ian and his team and I would not hesitate to recommend him to anyone wishing to build a timber frame home.
I live in Johannesburg, which made the selection of a competent builder an important consideration. Ian provided me with five references and I followed up on all of them before appointing him to build our house. I only managed to get down to site twice during the 38 week construction period and the rest was done by remote with Ian sending me photos on a weekly basis.
I decided to build a timber frame house for a couple of reasons. The first being that timber frame houses are thermally much more efficient than bricks and mortar. They retain heat in winter and they are cool in the summer months (which is why the majority of the houses in Scandinavia, the USA and Canada are timber frame houses).
Not only does this save on electricity, but it is environmentally much more sustainable. The second reason is that we were building on a plot that had a lot of Milkwood trees that we had to build around. We would not have been able to build our house using bricks and mortar as the foundations would have interfered with the trees (which are protected), whereas building a timber framed house allowed us to build in and around the trees.
We are thrilled with the end result which is nestled amongst the trees and which has a spectacular deck which is being shaded by a large Milkwood which comes up through the middle of the floor.
Ian runs a top quality operation and if given the chance, I would gladly use him again.
Alastair Campbell
Managing Director, Vantage GreenX
