Everyone in the comments is suddenly a construction and climate expert.
I just thought it looked cool lol
They’re building it right in front of those other people’s windows. Fuck these people.
Do local govts/authorities not block people from blocking others’ windows?
Around here you have to be a certain distance away from other windows, have your roof at a particular angle to make sure sunlight still reaches and a bunch of other stuff prior to approval… and even then neighbors are still free to block construction if it’s impacting their light
The people in the old house had windows that had a bonus view for a while. Now the property’s being developed and their bonus view just becomes a wall. If they wanted to maintain line of sight they should have purchased this property next to theirs.
It’d be a crazy world where you can’t build on your property because you would block the window of somebody else’s property
It looks like it’s being built in front of their house, not next to it, but I guess this is a corner lot? If it’s next to it then that’s normal.
Remember when we had enough room to build a house?
“I want a house.”
“We can squeeze one in here.”
“Oh…”
“For $800K.”
“Ooh…”
“You don’t want it? There’s a line.”
“Okay…” 😔
Always amses me to see you guys build your wood houses. This looks so much like a construction game for children, I want to play too!
Brick manufacturing devastates the environment. We build our houses from sustainable resources.because we’re not cavemen.
That is not the reasoning at all.
Places generally build with whatever sensical building material they have most widely available. If there are a ton of forests, they probably build with wood. If there’s a ton of stone, they probably build with stone.
You’re wrong, and honestly kind of a dick.
Meanwhile most of your energy sources are not renewable and per capita the average emissions of the American is double or even triple of the average European.
We build our houses from trees because we have lots of trees.
Why the aggressive tone? Each technique has its advantages. I guess brick and mortar houses would burn less in California, which has the same climate as Italy and Spain
Wouldn’t the inside of your house still have wood framing structure like this though? Looks like this neighbourhood uses vinyl siding, but you could easily have a brick/stone/stucco exterior.
Isn’t it way harder to run plumbing/electric through cinder blocks, let alone hanging drywall? Or do you build a cinderblock box first and then frame the inside with wood?
This place looks like it doesn’t have a basement, which is a must in Canada, and all our basements are generally concrete pour or cinderblocks, but we still have framing on the inside walls, and usually everything above the basement is wood + facade
Isn’t it way harder to run plumbing/electric through cinder blocks, let alone hanging drywall? Or do you build a cinderblock box first and then frame the inside with wood?
At least in South America (where most buildings are made of brick and mortar) there’s no drywall. The internal finish is a smooth layer on top of the bricks and that’s it. That makes it easier to hang heavy things on the wall but also makes it impossible to run wires of any kind. It also makes repairs more difficult.
Typically, yes. In the US at least, cinder block houses are common particularly in Florida and coastal regions. The inside would still likely have a moisture barrier and insulation on modern homes, so you will typically have wood framing for interior walls to allow for wiring, plumbing, and insulation that is then drywalled over.
Portugal here, no wood, just iron, steel and concrete. And bricks, of course.
Where I am in South Carolina very few people have basements as they would be prone to flooding
Interestingly enough, I was contemplating the amount of sand used in cinder blocks vs tabby.
you guys build your wood houses
What do you normally build houses with?
Or this
It’s not like it’s a “wood house” though just the framing is softwood lumber. The foundation is reinforced poured concrete, there’s steel support braces, the ties and hardware are likely zinc coated steel, roof is asphalt shingles or steel, wind bracing is lumber or steel rods depending on code, could even have exterior brick or vinyl siding.
In Europe? Bricks and mortar
Here in Europe, we use mostly cinder blocks or bricks. I guess wood is more common in Northern Europe and Switzerland
Wood is becoming popular for new constructions in France too.
With the new regulations you need to limit the amount of CO2 emitted for building and maintaining the house.
It’s much easier to respect this regulation by using wood rather than concrete so we see more and more wooden constructions now.
That’s because Europe has had many more centuries worth of deforestation. The greatest resource the Americas had to offer to Europe was essentially unlimited lumber.
And we wasted a lot of our forests on superfluous things like war ships - see the Castillan plateau which is now a dry and barren land.
Why aren’t they replanting?
Once you’ve destroyed an ecosystem, it takes a lot of effort to bring back. Often you can’t just expect to plant the same type of trees as before and expect it to take.
There are ways to introduce things gradually, but it’s not an on/off switch.
Plus there are entire keystone species of trees that blights drove to actual or morphological extinction. I don’t know about European species, but the mountains of appalachia used to be covered in massive American Chestnut trees that were so big around at the trunk they were on par with west coast species. After the blight, you can still find groves of chestnut trees, but its like they’re a different species - they live 7-9 years and die basically around the time they first mast. They never live long enough to really leave the sapling phase.
In Florida houses are also built from cinder blocks because wood is too weak against hurricanes.
Edit: interiors can be built from wood, but all exterior walls are made with cinder blocks.
Interesting. Here in California, building brick structures is prohibited because of the risk during earthquakes.
Exteriors are wood too, hurricane straps. Basically metal connectors connect everything from ground across the roof to the ground again.
So that people can remain secure like the third little pig!
In California we use wood because it flexes during earthquakes. There may be damage during a big one but at least the house is less likely to collapse on you.
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In earthquakes in NZ the wooden houses flex for sure. What kills you is the brick chimney falling through the roof.
And also because lumber is the most ubiquitous building material.
And also because there’s no snow or serious rain. Took me years to get used to the flimsy houses here, they wouldn’t last a year back in my country.
I don’t know about that. I’ve lived in a typical “flimsy” American wooden house in an area that had a lot of crazy weather with extreme winds and even a couple of tropical storms. That house had absolutely no issue with those. These houses are a lot stronger than they look. They flex but don’t break.
My house is 80 years old, I’ve personally seen 3 feet of snow on its roof, it weathered hurricane Fran with no damage, hurricane Matthew caused a leak around the chimney that stained my living room ceiling a little.
I’m ready to take anything this area is willing to throw at me except tornadoes. A direct strike by tornado will pull it down.
I live in the Pacific Northwest where it rains quite a bit. Wood houses are fine in the rain as long as the water barrier and roof have been installed correctly.
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I know it is possible to build solid houses out of wood. The ones I’m talking about would 100% not withstand blizzards or tornadoes.
Like most in my native country, I grew up in a building made entirely of solid reinforced concrete slabs, including most interior walls. I could not hear my upstairs or downstairs neighbors and when I saw people punching holes in the walls in American movies I thought it’s just an exaggeration, not something that can actually happen. Wooden houses were culturally associated with poor rural people who couldn’t afford living in a nice solid apartment. That culture persists today, and even in isolated villages new homes are built with concrete structures and brick walls.
When I bought a piece of land and was looking at options for new houses, I found a company making very solid wooden homes (still a lot more solid than the average Bay Area home) for reasonable prices and both my and my wife’s families were outraged at the idea of building a house out of wood.
Just some random background to why I’d use the word “flimsy” for wooden struts sandwiched between drywall sheets.
Canada also builds houses out of wood. There’s pretty serious snow here and the houses work great.
I also live in one of the the windiest cities in Canada . The asphalt shingles have blown off houses frequently, but the houses themselves are solid.
In Europe we use reinforced concrete for the same purpose. Don’t know if it works but it’s the way it’s done.
Wait, are earthquakes common in Europe?!
Italy ils pretty shaky, Portugal too. Southern France is waiting for its own Big One.
If we did that in the US west coast, they would crack and fall apart from tectonic plate shift. You need to build things to be flexible for earthquakes and general shift.
That’s a really poor argument to pass down to people.
Solutions exist to make buildings earthquake resilient and the USA created a good part of it.
Vibration dampeners, structure stress relievers, special mortars and concretes, specific structural geometry, etc.
There is no reason why the US should keep its attachment to wood construction. Tornado alley would vastly improve if house were to shift from match sticks and hope to brick and mortar with reinforced concrete foundations.
Tornado alley is a completely different part of the US than the West Coast, which is specifically what I was talking about. It’s like 2000 miles away. Tornado alley doesn’t have earthquakes, so this discussion doesn’t even apply to that. Bust now that were talking about it, in tornado alley, houses at least do have a brick exterior around the wood.
I picked Tornado Alley because it’s low hanging fruit; I’ll get to that again.
USA has a fixation for wood construction, completely unreasonable and unjustifiable. There are several countries and regions in the world with sysmic activity that do not opt to build in wood.
Japan sits atop a zone of tectonic plate subduction. Hearthquakes are not unknown to them and they build with modern materials. Tokyo, with its extreme population density, is built to withstand earthquakes and hurricanes. Are the USA dumber than Japan?
Regarding Hurricane Alley, wrapping a woodframe with brick doesn’t make the structure sturdier, just makes it heavier and more prone to break under stress, as the brick work won’t have structural role.
A properly built modern brick or block structure has a super structure reinforced with rebar and concrete, which then receives the brick/block work to finish the building, with some walls being part of the superstructure of the building. This forms a monolithic construction that tends to be very stuborn and stays in place unless something blows it to pieces. Older buildings used other techniques, usually tied to the brickwork itself to create load bearing structures.
Steel reinforcement is what keeps them up. At least it’s supposed to.
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We have plenty of brick houses here too, but they all are still built around wooden frames for the most part
something like this for example
I live on a fault line along the pacific ring of fire, and so building with wood was an absolute necessity for us so long, as they were structurally more lenient to the constant earthquakes. Even now I believe our old government building is the largest wooden building in the Southern hemisphere (and it’s only 4 stories tall). These days as construction techniques have changed, we’ve obviously built things with concrete, steel, brick, etc., but the wooden tradition remains strong, with a huge majority of modern houses here still being built like this.
That aside, wood was also just a much cheaper material to build with, so it was the most economical material to use for a long time for much of the “new world”.
Right. Buildings were mostly wood and mud in Europe until the 18th Century. By then, cities became so dense that big fires were extremely deadly. Little by little people started building in stone, then bricks and now reinforced concrete.
I’m currently in a neighborhood that was empty farmland as far as they eye could see just 5 years ago. I had never seen a building being built before, but now I drive past 4 complexes being built just on my way to the grocery store. They’re also building a closer grocery store.
This area is going to be so nice in like 5 years, but right now it’s an absolute mess of construction, road widenings, putting utilities in the ground, etc. We didn’t even have cell access here when I moved in 9 months ago.
I had never seen a building being built before
Must have been nice
ITT: Bricks good, wood bad. Nobody with a clue about thermal bridging and energy efficiency to be found.
Or how frames work
I always wondered why american houses are destroyed so easily in storms
I now have my answer
Tell me you know nothing about construction without telling me you know nothing about construction.
So what would you build a house out that can take 400 kph debris storm
Yea it takes a few decades to get this far
This looks like the perfect Lemmy post.
A bunch of people who know fuck-all about the subject matter at hand (in this case construction), and then sprinkle in the usual anti-American bias that flavors a large number of posts on this site. The only thing missing seems to be something dealing with Linux or some pro-commie spin.
At least they’re using an open framework. I hope the plans are GPL compatible.
Oversized garden shed by the looks of it.
And yet, that’s someone’s home that they are proud to have, I’ll bet.
It just looks like a regular house to me. Your garden shed has two floors?
My oversized garden shed has two floors, yes. I have to admit that the other sheds on my premises are a bit smaller.
I don’t see floor trusses used too often so it’s neat to see them here
I’m seeing them more and more, which means OSB is probably too expensive to use for engineered trusses now.
It’s a trade off, more expensive, but you’re not replacing them because some trade made an incorrect penetration.
Basically you’re paying more to prevent issues later.
It’s used so the other trades don’t wreck all the TGIs by putting incorrect penetrations. It has all the holes they could possibly need, but sometimes they’ll stick cut a plate….
