Plus, a lot of us use ringshank nails or specialty fasteners (depending on application needs). An old smooth finish nail will come out very easily by comparison.
Is the OP begging the question? 
Modern homes have to be designed to certain codes, and certain expenses previously directed towards structure now have to go into things like radon vents, A/C, ductwork, smoke detectors, proper railings, GFCI, carpets, scald protectors and more things than you can possibly imagine.
Give me 150k to build a structure and you will find one ready to go a centruy. Give me 150 to build a modern house and I’ll need an acountant and a lawyer to figure out how the heck we are gonna get it to last 25-50 years.
Jumping on the “bull to hand-driven nails being stronger” theme…
Most nails for guns are cement-coated - the friction of being driven into the wood melts the coating and the nail is literally glued in.
Hand-hammered nails are somewhat less likely to be cement-coated, if for no other reason that if you pause even slightly while hammering, the glue takes hold with the nail part-way in, and the next hammer blow only bends the nail.
As for the angle, have you ever seen someone using a nail gun? Other than “into the wood” there’s little control or thought given to the aim when pulling the trigger.
The engineering is better overall today - whether it’s things like joist hangers (No more intentional weakening of lumber by making notches to accept other boards), roof hold-down straps to keep the lid on in a hurricane, laminated lumber or just refinements to codes, the ingredients are there for much stronger and durable construction than even 40 years ago.
That brings up a point I was thinking of. It seems to me that one of the major factors of wherther an older home is good or not is if it was professionally constructed. At least around Denver, it seems up until the 1940’s or so there was still a fair amount of homeowner construction. That the guy who bought the land, got his friends and family together and just built the damn house themselves. WHich leads to alot of the poor spcaing, no right angles problems you were describing. But a lot of the houses originally built by rich folk who hired professional house builders and carpenters just seem top have a much more solid house.
However with building codes and all almost all more recent houses have been forced to be professionally built, or at least personally built by people fully capable of good construction.
There is just a higher level of standards, so even the worst new houses are decent. Where as the really crappy old houses are already gone, but the medium crappy old houses are heading towards the end of their useability lifespan and causing problems. But I would expect the good old houses to outlast the standardized new houses.
My first response was, “They’re not”. The electrical systems are unrefined, the outlets are scarce, the plumbing is metal and prone to corrosian, the shake roofs burn, and my grandparents’ house had shredded newspaper for insulation, until they called someone in decades later.
I would have thought rising land prices would lead to higher quality homes, even taking into account a higher cost of building in that area. For example, you might be able to put up a poorly built house for $100,000 on a $100,000 parcel of land in the midwest but it might cost $200,000 on a $1m parcel of land in California. A quality house might cost $200,000 to put up in the mid west and $400,000 in California which means your paying 50% more for quality in the midwest but only 16.6% more in California.
I find that extremely hard to believe. I know for an absolute fact that last year in Bakersfield, CA, there were new houses going for 130K, and that’s with the (inexpensive) land. I can only assume they were going to last more than 50 years.
Sorry, I meant in 2004. Still, the point stands.
I have some experience with this subject. My house was built before 1760 and was largely original (the main, saltbox still is). You can go in the attic or the basement and see the massive, hand-cut beams that were carefully put together. A year ago May, a gigantic oak tree probably as old as the house with a stump almost 5 feet across came straight down on the back section of the house. My wife and I were sleeping but the sound was tremendous and we knew what happened instantly. We ran to our daughter’s room and had to pry the door open. Then we were confronted with the sight of her ceiling being dropped down a foot, the walls bowing out and near collapse, and giant oak branches piercing the walls and ceiling going all the way to the floor. She was quietly sleeping with wood and paint covering her BTW. When the final bills came in, the damage was close to $300,000 and we had to replace much of that side of the house. It is bigger and much better now and the quality in the new part seems as good as the old part and it is much more efficient with modern conveniences.
Some of the contractors that looked the tree strike and put in temporary supports say that the giant beams running down the center of the rooms cut 250 years ago probably saved her life. We had a very good contractor and reconstruction took 7 months. I talked to him several times about old versus new construction and he explained that new construction is better overall because of better materials and better use of geometry and engineering.
There are many houses around the same age as ours in this area and some even go back to the 1600’s. The bottom line is that people have known how to make houses last for long time in every era and some built quality ones and others crappy ones. However, home building has advanced as a science just like every other field and someone willing to use that has an advantage.
I should go on record as admitting the points about generous safety margins in old houses. I think it Joel Achenbach in his “Why Things Are” books who pointed out that the engineers of the time overcompensated for ignorance of the true tolerences, and that only the good stuff has survived 200 years to become antiques. The story above about the tree collapse probably would be different with a new house, but the speed/cost, livability/fire quality, and often the cost of heating/cooling of the house would also be different.
I also think that there is some selection bias going on: there are old crappy houses still around, but people often don’t realize how old they are because they don’t seem particularly historical.
There was a mill neighborhood in my old town where the houses were all built at least 70 years ago. They were cheap when they were built and it shows: in half of them, if you drop a marble in the living room, you have to jog to keep up with it, it rolls so fast towards the back. Kitchen floors are universally spongy. Interior walls are paper thin. Floor plans are awkward and cramped, wiring bizarre, etc. Half of the original houses are gone and have been replaced with various things, but the rest soldier on. It’s a great neighborhood, very working class, plus lots of students and little old ladies. But no one thinks of those houses as “historical”–the “historical” ones are the ones that are exactly the same age half a mile away, that are and were built to be beautiful. htose are the exampels of how they used to build houses. It’s like no one notices that the little crappy houses are old, too. They are just an immutable fact of life.
New houses certainly can be built better. Case in point: One of my best friend’s husband is a contracter/ builder, and built their house a few years back in Slidell, on the Gulf coast. Hurricane Katrina laid waste to their neighborhood, every house around them was blown to smithereens and collapsed except theirs. It had a lot of damage, but still was relatively intact. The quickly built houses around them are just gone. They’ve been working to rebuild it enough to be able to sell it, and recoup something.
The insurance runaround has been a nightmare, though.
That kind of work does still happen if you hire a craftsman that is skilled and proud of his work. Just this week I am installing two non standard size exterior custom made wood doors the homeowner paid over a grand a piece for. I am custom building rough openings, the jambs, whole nine yards, and you are damn straight he is getting good work. And I am charging him damn good money.
I know where you are coming from, but most of us self-employed in the trades get our work from word of mouth, so “shitty work= no more work.”
Oops, sorry mods, forgot this was GQ, pardon the OT post.
Which does not necessarily mean that it was stronger at the time it was built. Old wood, if protected from rotting, will harden with age, as the sap crystallizes. Basically, you end up with amber permeating the lumber. Now, it may well be that it was maple or oak rather than pine, but even pine will get pretty hard, with time.
That is good to know. If true, it would explain my experiences of trying to hammer in door frames and things in my house and bending nail after nail with very little penetration. I wondered how they even cut that stuff 250 years ago. Still, the wood feels exceptionally heavy and dense so the old growth wood that they used must be at least part of it.