After months of demolition of the interior, a few false starts, and after interviewing numerous architects, we welcomed the addition of Architect Bentley Tibbs to our project. After seeing several of Bentley’s projects and meeting his clients, we knew Bentley would help us articulate our thoughts about the design of the house and turn them into reality. You can see Bentley’s work at www.bentleytibbsarchitect.com.









One of the first and most pressing decisions we needed to make was about replacing the roof. We had been advised that we would also need to replace the tectum tiles, which acted as the substructure of the roof. The tiles were stained and warped from water and time causing parts of roof structure to deflect and water to pond on the roof in several areas. We also new that if we were replacing the roof and it’s substructure that we wanted to raise the roof on the sides of the house which were barely 7.6ft high. Subtract from 7.6ft the exposed beams carrying the weight of the ceiling and you can imagine how low the ceilings felt in the bedrooms and bathrooms of the house.









The answer to our needs was the SIPS (structural insulated panel system) Panel. SIPS are high performance building panels used in floors, walls, and roofs for residential and light commercial buildings. The panels are typically made by sandwiching a core of rigid foam plastic insulation between two structural skins of oriented strand board (OSB). The result is a building system that is extremely strong and energy efficient. Famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright used structural insulated panels in some of his affordable Usonian houses built throughout the 1930’s and 1940’s. SIPS are custom manufactured for each project, shipped to site, then these massive panels are lifted into place by crane. Most importantly, because of their incredible strength and ability to span distances without support, SIPS panels gave us the opportunity to do away with the beams in the bedrooms and bathrooms and raise the roof to a more comfortable 9ft.