Probably more for GQ or IMHO, but I want to give this new board a spin.
Why are wooden houses so prevalent in the US? It seems to me that in most parts of the world - I know personally that in Mexico it is certainly the case - brick, cinder block and cement are the most common materials used to build houses. Why not so in the US?
It seems like renovation and upkeep are big issues in housing in the US and it looks like its mostly due to the fact that the wood doesn’t last long, a wooden house can’t go 20 years without needing some renovation, while stone and brick houses can go for much longer.
Why is this the case? Tradition? Cost? Insulation? As far as I can tell they do seem to be built faster than any other type of house, but is that the only advantage?
I’ve nothing to add except that I too am interested in the answer to this question. In Ireland I’ve only ever seen a couple of wooden houses. They’re very rare.
I spend most of a chapter on this, but the short answer is: cheap wood. My house was built during the golden age of wood construction in the U.S., when the virgin forest was being cut down and enormous quantities of high quality lumber were available at low cost. Even now, despite steady price increases, wood is used to frame 80 percent of the houses in the U.S. European forests were reduced long ago and the lumber just isn’t available. My Polish carpenters told me that was the big difference between construction in the U.S. and Europe.
When my house was built (1860), it was a farm in the middle of nowhere. From the looks of things, thing probably had a portable sawmill used timber on the land. Although there’s a ton of rock in my area of Tennessee, mostly it’s limestone bedrock, which isn’t easy to unearth and build with.
I learned the answer to that on PBS. You guys burned up all your wood making iron.
And in fireplaces while poets sat around drinking yummy Guinness and writing beautiful prose.
Ah, the heart doth pine.
Peace,
mangeorge
Additionally, it’s easier to train labor for wood construction. Not the mention the huge infrastructure we have here to support stick built framing - modular sizing and all.
I imagined it was something along the lines of what hombre posted but it never dawned on me that it’s because of the availability of wood in the US. It seems pretty obvious now.
As long as it is being lived in and given routine preventative maintenance – heated during the winter, and kept insulated from the elements – a wood frame (what builders often call “stick built”) house will last centuries. There’s thousands of houses from the 18th century throughout New England.
Some cities in the US are what I call “brick cities”, either because of tradition, or legislation that often arose from disastrous fires. Chicago is perhaps the largest. Houses built before WWII in Omaha and Denver are primarily brick as well. Frame houses will still be found in their post-WWII suburbs, though.
In parts of the US where termites are a problem, frame houses are the exception. throughout Texas (outside of the West Texas desert) and Oklahoma, most new houses are brick. In central and southern Florida, it’s stucco-covered concrete block; in northern Florida face brick covers cinder block. In Florida, often the second floor of a two-story house is frame. Older houses in Florida are often constructed from Cypress wood, which is termite-resistant. A Floridian here could probably tell you about a “termite bond” that banks often require when one gets a mortgage on a frame house in that state.
One big problem with wood construction: delicate elements such as architectural decoration or railings may deteriorate quickly in a harsh climate. In Buffalo, outside of historic districts, very few houses built more than 40 years ago have their original wood railings. Through the years most were replaced with gaudy Italian-style wrought iron.
It is also cultural. Consider that Columbus landed in the Americas only a little over 500 years ago, and the US declared independence from England only a little over 200 years ago.
When I was in Austria, I had dinner with a man who built a stunning timber framed house including cork insulation. Everyone in the village laughed at him, because everyone knows that if you build a house out of wood, it won’t be around in 2 or 3 hundred years. In America they think 100 years is a long time. In Europe, they think 100 miles is a long distance.
We have a Doper, whose name escapes me at the moment, who once dryly remarked, “I have *furniture *older than your country.” IIRC, he lives in an actual castle in France.
Yes, I can corroborate that at least in some areas of the country, 100 years is an old building. I live in Chicago, in one of the “old” apartment buildings on the north side. Construction was completed in 1928 according to the tax records, and 1930 according to NexTag. This age of building is old enough to be too old by community standards - anything that sells on this block is torn down and replaced with similar, but newer construction. Not single family homes replaced with 3 flats, but 6 flats torn down and replaced with newer 6 flats, just because these buildings are “too old” to be appealing and/or expensive to heat and cool.
“Old” was a little older where I spent summers in New Jersey growing up. But even there, my father’s Victorian was “old”. No one was sure the actual year of construction, but there were signatures under the wallpaper from 1892 on.
My circa 1760 house in Massachusetts is all wood, in great shape, and mostly original. There are oodles of houses in the immediate area from the 1700’s and a few down the street from the early 1600’s. I grew up in Louisiana where it is very humid. I always believed that wood deteriorated just as a function of age but that is not true. As mentioned above, wood houses can easily last for centuries and have no real expiration date.
Wood can certainly last a long time, not far from me is a house that has 1611 carved into the oak timber framing, and that only refers to the extension part of the house which was the most recent addition.
I think the only place that is likely to be much older is the Bingley Arms which dates back to around 953AD, which makes William the Bastard something of a newcomer - but to be honest its not properly old and it has had a lot of work fairly recently from the 1700s onwards.
Cheap wood was available in most places, but it also insulates better than stone and is shaped easier. The US supply of wood has tightened up drastically in the last few decades. This is why engineered lumber and alternative materials have been incorporated into most housing.
The Caledonia bluffs near here had an abundance of glacial drift. The stones have to be removed from the fields yearly. The original farm houses are all beautiful cut field stone in walls that are about two feet thick. I love these houses.
I’ve looked at a barn to be burned this winter. The beams under the floor are hard oak about 10 inches thick cut parallel on two sides. The sides vary up to 18 inches wide. It’s a shame to see somebody just burn this wood. The main posts for the loft are OK, but nothing special. Maybe 10x10". This is what happens when farms get bought up to form one big farm.
It’s owned by somebody that has enough money and acreage he doesn’t want to bother dealing with something like that. The house was a drug house and after those people were removed the house and barn were marked to be burned this winter. I would love to have the barn wood. The beams and some of the flooring is good, the rest is bad. The guy is trying to restore the dikes and drain the fields from the flood damage still.
IIRC, he lives in an actual castle in France.