A Calgary company is re-framing the business of home framing

Changing the way we build homes A Calgary cabinet maker says he’s devised a more environmentally friendly way to frame homes. Kevin Fleming explains.

A Calgary cabinet maker has come up with a new way to frame a home which he says is more environmentally friendly than conventional building methods.

Maurice Viens started Biffco Framing shortly after he moved to Calgary from Montreal.

He says his system doesn’t use wood from old growth forests which can often twist or bend in the building process.

He was working on a job site when he came up with the idea to use oriented strand board or O.S.B instead of lumber for framing.

“When we developed this that's what we realized that by using O.S.B  how straighter we can make things, how it can resist twisting, warping and everything, and at the end of the day you have a better product,” says Viens.

O.S.B is an engineered lumber similar to particle board that is cut and made into studs and producies next to no waste.

“If you have ever been around a job site and you look at their waste bin it doesn’t make sense the amount of pieces that are perfectly good but because they’re round or they’re crooked they have to be tossed in the garbage,” says Viens.

The walls are built in his shop and shipped to a job site.

“Some idea as building downtown,” he says. “The steel structure is all built somewhere else and it gets to the job site and they assemble it using bolts and everything but there’s no cutting there’s no waste and that’s what we want to do for a house.”

One of his walls was taken to Vancouver for stress testing and was found to be up to nine times stronger than current standards.

“When the time came to have it tested, believe me I was crossing my fingers, because I had people helping me financially to get it done, so it was do or die that day, and when I saw the results  even the people doing the tests were impressed,” says Viens.

The O.S.B is cut and used for all parts of the wall replacing conventional lumber and is as easy to put together as Lego.

Designer and architect Dawn Lavergne says it’s a simplified system and nothing has to change in terms of the design of the house.

“I actually told Maurice when I met him that I wanted to come out and put together his shed package, as a female with no construction knowledge or building knowledge other than designing of a house,” says Lavergne.

Biffco Framing has had interest from builders south of the border specifically California and Florida.