The opportunity is growing for homebuilders to use Petersburg-milled Tongass lumber in their building projects.

The sawmill on Falls Creek Road — Alaska Timber and Truss, owned in partnership by Brett Martin and Mike Duman — is offering complete home and cabin kits using locally harvested timber.

The operation produces solid wall and timber-frame cabin kits and larger stick-built home packages.

“The cabin kits are kind of more of a traditional size ... generally speaking, under 800 square feet,” Martin says. “And then we also do home kits that are like a one bedroom, one bath. We do a two-bedroom, one bath and a three-bedroom, two-bath house kit.”

“We do everything from the flooring to the joists to the studs to the rafters to trusses,” Martin explains. “We have not constructed trusses for people yet, but that is an option we’re exploring. But right now, we’re just milling the lumber for people, and they can build their own trusses.”

The kits being offered are quite new, so there are few examples of them completed around Petersburg just yet. However, multiple projects are currently in the works.

On Farm Island near Wrangell, a solid-wall cabin is under construction using the mill’s timber. “It’s a solid wall, 6-by-6 timber. And, essentially, they’re being stacked, more or less like Lincoln Logs.” Martin describes. “It’s got 12-foot-high walls, the first floor has got 8-foot walls, and then the second floor has a short 3-foot pony wall, but it is a full loft.”

For the Farm Island project, Martin says they milled everything for that house except for the flooring. “They opted to put in plywood for the floor, so we gave them floor beams, floor joists, all the walls, the second-floor floor beams, and then we’ve milled up the rafters for them, the barge boards, the fascia boards.

And on Petersburg’s Mitkof Island, a project is underway just down the road from the sawmill, near the Falls Creek fish ladder. “They’re building an outdoor kitchen shelter there, where half of it is enclosed and half of it is open. They’re doing a garage there as well, and then two house kits,” says Martin.

For the more complex home kits, Martin worked with an architect in California “who did the home kits for us. ... The one-bedroom, one-bath; two-bedroom, one-bath; and the three-bedroom, two-bath houses, those were all drawn up by an architect. The other cabins, I typically will hand draw them.”

“That’s honestly, one thing that’s taken more time than I would have thought, because I hadn’t envisioned the level of effort that would be required to actually draw assembly instructions.”

It takes time, but he translates the cabin plans into assembly instructions for customers who might not have much building experience. Martin, whose father was a carpenter and who has been experiencing hands-on building projects most of his life, is conscientious that some of the customers who buy kits are coming from different backgrounds and may “be starting from scratch.”

Construction costs are high in Southeast Alaska, on the moderate end a customer might expect to pay $250 to $300 per square foot for construction costs, and on the high-end builds $500 per square foot is not unheard of.

Martin estimates substantial savings for self-builders. “If I was to say what was the number that you could save if you built it yourself — and I’m guessing here — but I would say at least, at least $100 if not $125 a square foot. … How you finish the cabins, the flooring, the ceilings, the furnishings, the showers, the sinks, the countertops, however you decide to finish it ... that’s where your largest variable in home construction costs are.”

While the sawmill does have kiln drying available for their lumber, some building methods work well with green wood and can save on some of the added costs of kiln drying.

“If you’re doing solid-wall stuff,” says Martin. “You want to either mill it after it’s dried for two years, or you want to build with it green so it all uniformly shrinks together.”

Conventional stud framing handles green lumber differently. “If you do typical stud framing, green lumber typically does not affect anything at all,” Martin explains.

And with young-growth local timber harvest opportunities increasing, the mill thinks about the different advantages offered by the available tree species.

“Sitka spruce,” Martin says, “We’re banking on that being more of our framing timber, or our dimensional lumber, and potentially bigger post-and-beam type stuff, because of its strength to weight ratio. ... Sitka spruce, it’s pretty good. That’s why they built airplanes in the past with them.”

Recent projects for the sawmill include major timbers for Baranof Island Lodge and an educational pavilion for Pacific High in Sitka.

“We delivered a big frame package for the outdoor educational pavilion. We milled them up a bunch of 12-by-12 posts, 8-by-12 purlins and connecting girders, and then 8-by-9 rafters. And then that’s covered with a 2-inch-thick car decking for the roof. … Their whole thing is that they wanted to showcase young-growth spruce and hemlock here on the Tongass being used in a variety of ways.”

For homeowners and gardeners there is local timber available for smaller-scale projects. For example, Martin built a greenhouse for his wife last year. “More and more products for people to build using garden beds, greenhouses, chicken coops, dog houses, you name it,” he says, “there’s just all different kinds of things that we can provide for people.”

The upcoming timber sale associated with the U.S. Forest Service’s Thomas Bay Stewardship project, for Martin, represents an important opportunity to scale up and increase what his mill can offer to the region.

Currently, the timber supply for Martin’s operation comes primarily from micro sales.

“We’ve been able to buy what they call micro sales. We personally go out and lay out the sale, and then the Forest Service goes out, inspects the actual trees that we have selected for the micro sale, and generally speaking, has to be under 50,000 board feet,” Martin explains.

“When it comes to trying to make a good economic timber sale, that doesn’t work all that well. … There’s efficiency in economy at scale,” says Martin.

This piecemeal availability of timber has limited the sawmill’s long-term planning ability. “Not having security in your volume, in your supply, means that you, generally speaking, run your operation day to day, rather than several years at a time.”

“If you don’t have a supply, you can’t go out and get contracts with various retailers, because there’s no guarantee you’re going to have material,” Martin says.

If he can win the Thomas Bay stewardship timber contract when it goes out for bids, “it should give us something we can use for milling timber and cabin kits for the next five to seven years,” he says.