Eleven people and a timber shop on Griffin Drive

How the shop came about

Wendell Saito started as an apprentice framer in Missoula in 1999, spent eight years on production crews learning what a schedule does to quality, and moved to Bozeman in 2007 to work on old houses. In 2011 he rented a bay on Griffin Drive, bought a mortising machine and started cutting timber frames for other builders.

The renovation work came later, and it came because clients kept asking the same question: who is going to run the rest of this? A timber frame is the most visible part of a project and rarely the hardest. The hard part is the order everything else happens in, and the fact that four trades all want the same wall cavity on the same Tuesday.

So the company grew into a general contractor that still has a shop. That combination is unusual and it is the whole proposition: the structural understanding to know what a house can take, and the millwork capability to finish it without ordering a single off-the-shelf transition strip.

What we will not do

We do not take single-room jobs. We do not work without a permit. We do not start a foundation in October and hope. We do not price a basement finish before we know what the water is doing, and we do not put drywall over a problem because the client asked us to hurry.

We also say no to roughly one project in five, usually because it is too small for us to do efficiently or because a specialist would serve the client better. Saying that on the first call rather than the third is part of the job.