stewart brand made the case for photographing services before cladding the walls but i hadn't thought to do it for the floor.

why would you recommend going without sills? seems to me they'd add a good bit of rigidity to the frame.

The slab/foundation is the sill. Heavy timber sills are for rock foundations and such. Stick builders need the 2x plate to fasten the studs to. Depending on the size of the building you may only need 4 point where the frame contacts the foundation. Now, you will need something to fasten the wall system to. Did I read straw as a possibility? SIPs would use a plate tacked to the slab which the panels are routed for.

You could skip the fat sills, but I'm not a fan of skipping the sills entirely. What I mean is instead using a short sill. This gives you a definite location to put your posts, and provides a good means of resisting any tendency of the posts to move out at the bottoms.

Around here many barns built around the turn of the century are timber framed, and built on a continuous, solid block or stone foundation. The fat sill is often gone on these barns, and instead the posts are tenoned into a narrow sill -about 2" to 3" high resting on the concrete blocks. It's minimal, serves no real purpose structurally as the foundation does that. It just keeps the posts up a bit and keeps them in place.

I am afraid not to use any kind of a sill, I have seen the results of that in many 100 year old barns in my area. These barns all had sills originally but at some point more recently the sills were cut out of some of them for assorted reasons. The result is in a lot of these barns that the posts have spread significantly at the base. Not a good thing to be sure.

And I am weary of anchoring posts into concrete with steel connections. That just gives me the willies. I am afraid of what that could look like 50 or 100 years down the road.

Mule tree, you're in the same boat everyone sails in when they first think about timber framing. It's different than what everyone else does, and it therefore leads to a lot of questions. And the timber framing books do not answer all the hundreds of practical "how to" questions a do if youselfer has. Most of the guys on this board do timber framing for a living, therefore, they know how to answer all these questions, plan for them in design, implimenet them in construction, and deal with problems that arise. Using steel plates and bolts is easier for most people, but what you end up with timbers bolted together. Nothing wrong with that, but it's something different than timber framing. My best advice would be to find a timber framer in Kentucky, and hire him to help you design and build a frame, and teach you how to incorporate it into your overall house. It will be money well spent.

i actually wound up meeting with a timber framing out fit in louisville a few days back and i think we worked out a pretty fair arrangement. we'll have them down here for a workshop (we should be able to pull 10 couples) which'll get me familiar with the work. in addition to that they're interested in some walnut and maple on the property, so there might be a chance of trade on some fine tuning of the design work. still, i'm pleased to have this forum to get a chorus of opinions. thanks again!