Here in my corner of the US, you can reasonably expect a brick outer wall, a vapor barrier, some insulating sheathing (polyiso), some kind of wood-ish sheathing- OSB or plywood, and then the house framing, with more insulation between the studs. Then usually the inner layer of drywall.
I guess another way to look at it is to ask whether anyone needs a house made the traditional masonry way enough to warrant the extra price? There are plenty of 50-75 year old wood framed/brick veneer homes out there doing just fine.
Another reason for that style of construction is that it’s likely MUCH easier to modify the house- expand rooms, move walls, add-on, etc… if all you’re dealing with is wood framing and drywall.
Why? America is huge, and a lot of us have what Europeans would consider huge plots of land. I live in a suburb built in the 1960s and have JUST a half acre and could easily triple the size of my home without building upwards.
Why would you not want to be able to buy a small cheap house, and as you establish yourself and have more money, be able to add on to the house to suit your new needs and desires?
The Amish - a group that came out of Europe - do this regularly. They just build on to the house, just like Lego, as their families grow.
OTOH, most of the western United States is *very *susceptible to fire, and yet people still insist on building their houses out of flammable materials.
A coworker from India said that she was surprised when she first came to this country to find that most of our houses are made of wood. Over there apparently the preferred building materials are concrete or masonry.
For hurricanes and similar extreme weather, I pick A. I can’t imagine the widespread damage a slate roof would cause in a hurricane strong enough to peel off the tiles. And of course it will take a strong wind to peel off tiles but it takes a strong wind to peel off shingles. I don’t know much about brick outer and inner walled homes, I have never seen them. How do they handle flooding or rain? Can they breath well enough to avoid mold in semi-tropical climates? If you plan to build say 2500 homes (there is a subdivision going in near me of that size), can your local labor market provide enough masons to do all that brick work in a reasonable time and at a reasonable cost? As for tile roofs, don’t they leak? I seem to remember stories about tile and or slate roofs leaking regularly in high winds and or freezing conditions. But I may not have heard correctly. Outside temperate climates, how do such roofs do in general?
I also wonder whether such traditions are set more by the availability of raw materials than some objective requirements. In countries with large tracts of forested land and well-developed infrastructure to harvest, process and ship wood products, wood is a versatile and cheap building material. Look at Scandinavia, while their standards are high, they still use wood in home construction.
There’s no reason the garage absolutely has to be on the front of the house, though. I’ve seen some houses dating from the 1950s to the 1970s that put the garage door or carport on the side or even the back of the house. That left the front of the house with a more attractive wall with windows and shutters and all that. I think the reason this isn’t done more often is because then there has to be room for the driveway to go past the house and then turn 90 or 180 degrees into the garage. Most developers nowadays squeeze houses so close together there simply isn’t room for that.
Aus is a country sort of like the USA, in that we actually do constuct houses. But we also have a lot of recent Chinese immigrants, so we construct tower appartments as well.
A typical house around here is single-level, wood-frame, floating-slab, brick-veneer. By American or Euoropean standards, it’s a tent that keeps the rain out, but doesn’t keep the weather out. It will last 50-100 years if the termites don’t get it first. At the end of life, it will have sagged a bit. I won’t have to replace the roof, but I will have to repair it: the concrete tiles can be damaged by hail, or by people walking on them, or shifted by wind.
In that lifetime all of the electrical switches and built in light fittings will need replacing, as will all the bathroom fittings. all the locks and door handles, some of the doors, and probably the furnace. Internal walls will need patching.
There’s also no objective reason it shouldn’t. It’s a matter of aesthetic preference, and little more.
One thing about a garage on front is that it’s well-suited to narrow lots (not wide enough to have yard on side and sometimes with no alley or entry from back).
There are plenty of wood framed/wood sided houses considerably older than that which are doing just fine, also. Mine’s roughly 120, and there are quite a few older than that.
– admittedly, “old” in Europe and “old” in the USA are two different things. And it’s difficult to find the quality of wood now that was in use even 100 years ago; really good wood takes a long time to grow, and modern forestry doesn’t allow for it. (Those 2 x 4’s and 2 x 6’s and so on have shrunk, too; even since the days when those became standardized sizes. I’ve seen in the walls of moderately old houses, and they actually were 2" x 4" or whatever. New ones aren’t.)
Sounds pretty much exactly like the ones around here, except that I have a pier-and-beam foundation, and mine’s decently insulated against heat and cold. Houses are like anything else- they require periodic maintenance, which sometimes means outright replacement of things such as roofs, floors, internal drywall, etc… For example, in my 1969-vintage house, we’re slowly replacing the wiring- the original is aluminum which is not great, but we can’t really afford to do it all at once.
I’m not sure that dimensional lumber not actually being the labeled size matters or indicates much of anything. It’s just a shorthand- we could just as easily call it an AxB, and as long as everyone was aware, it wouldn’t much matter.
It very rarely snows in the UK, right? That implies it’s a lot warmer than the northern tier of the US during the winter, where the daily highs often don’t reach freezing (0C) for weeks at a time. Brick houses aren’t popular here in the northeast because brick is a really poor insulator - brick has an R value of 0.2. Straw bales are about R-1.5 [cite]…
Which isn’t to say it’s impossible to find brick buildings in the upper New England area, there are some, mostly ancient. And horribly, awfully miserable in the winter. I used to work in a converted mill building and even with heat blasting it was freezing anywhere more than a few feet from the heat vents five months of the year.
This. Wood and metal flexes; brick and stone shatters. Their own weight just means they break more easily in a quake.
Related:
Here in California, that’s a deadly hazard since in an earthquake that brick facing will peel off and land on anyone who happens to be walking by when it hits.
My recent purchase is a fixer-upper, circa 1900 but solid. There are hand hewn 8x8 support beams in a fieldstone basement. A lot of the original flooring is 2x15 planks (!), there is built-in cabinetry, etc. Saying it’s made of wood is kind of an understatement; it’s a monstrosity of lumber and I love it.
Not all of the bedrooms have closets. None of the cabinetry can accommodate a large dinner plate. The ductwork is huge and sprawling, the furnace was old when Carter was President. These and many other things have to be addressed, systematically, but it’s not because the things themselves weren’t built well.
When I was living and working in Germany, I was amazed by home construction quality. I helped a colleague install a TV antenna in his attic (early 80’s home) and was surprised to find a poured concrete floor in the attic. Beams, posts and rafters supporting the red tile roof were 8"x8" or 4"x10" equivalents.
Interior walls were a foot thick and made of concrete blocks. Exterior stuccoed walls were even thicker. Houses seemed to be built for generations.
An American who also worked there was building a new house in Maryland. He brought pictures of his new home as it was being framed. When he showed them off, a coworker said “I see the shipping crate but where is the house?”
I live in Vermont, and our farmhouse is circa 1825. In the dirt basement you can see the tree trunks cut in half that support the first floor, they are about 12-18 inches wide, and still have the 200 year old bark on them. The roof is metal, I don’t think original but still over a hundred years old. It’s not standing seam, but 1/4" thick sheets that are about 4 feet wide and 8 feet tall with a cool scalloped design pressed in. I have to scrape some rust off and put on a coat of paint this year, for the first time in 15 years. Lathe and plaster walls that destroy any attempt to put in a nail or screw, the sound insulation is super good. No plywood for the exterior, just inch thick wide planks over the framing, covered by clapboard. Most of the really big windows even still have the original wavy glass, and there’s so many windows.
I’m pretty sure that my old house could survive a tornado or earthquake if it was magically transplanted to another part of the country. Actually it has survived small earthquakes and 70 MPH winds, just since I’ve been here. And not to mention the massive weight of snow and ice on the roofs every winter.
Anyways I think that in the ‘old days’ they built shit to last, to pass down through the family for generations. Today, it’s build a shit box as cheap as possible. Nobody stays in the same house for a long time, so screw it, let the new owner fix it. I think the average lifespan of any part of a new house is 15-25 years, and then it needs to be replaced, not restored. Kind of sad, actually.
When I finally purchase my own home, I don’t want anything built past 1953 or so. Old homes have their issues, but generally speaking, the workmanship, craftsmanship, and quality of materials is far superior to what you’ll find in a ‘modem’ home.
Though I prefer concrete and masonry, I’m not anti wood. A solidly constructed wood house with quality materials will last a very long time it taken care of