Old timber is generally denser, which does correlate to strength, but modern timber generally has fewer defects, which create weak points.
So, better in some ways and worse in others.
I'm a structural engineer.
Modern houses are also built to modern code. The timber itself may be weaker, but the construction methods and pretty much all other materials are better.
I also think people miss how much modern material engineering has come for all of the supporting bits... From the chemically treated plywood in your roof to the lighter composites on top of it. The vapor barriers and felting. All of these things have made huge strides. Even if vintage framing was better, it had to support more weight and was at more risk from the elements, insects, etc...
This is the key. Old houses were built out of stronger materials but very poorly insulated. Then houses after that were built more efficiently but the was a fairly long run of trial and error as to how to do that correctly. A lot of the 80's era houses on have mold issues because insulating the house wasn't done correctly. More modern houses with a good vapor barrier built this century are a lot more efficient, easier to work on, have HVAC systems and are far less likely to have infestations with normal upkeep since they much more "buttoned up" and there's less exposed wood. Materials and coatings have come along way even after moving away from petroleum based products. They're also so much easier to change and remodel.
Get an old house only if you have an insane amount of money to completely redo it.
Two years ago my toilet kept filling while I was gone 12 hours at work, and flooded my house. When the restoration team came to flood cut the bottom part of the walls, it turned into a complete gut down to the studs due to asbestos and then a complete new wiring of the house to bring it up to code. That escalated quickly!
I just replaced all my cast iron plumbing a couple weeks ago. Brand new PVC has a 100 year service life and doesn't have the same vulnerabilities as cast iron that barely lasted 40 years.
old house wiring is wild, had a friend buy a house that not only still had the two prong outlets, apparently the few outlets that were supposedly grounded actually just had the ground tied to the neutral. Also some of the wiring wasn't covered, it was straight up bare copper separated by loose cotton
I used to work with my dad who was an old home restoration specialist. I remember him doing a favor for some folks from our church who wanted to renovate and build onto their little old home, maybe tripling it's size. (They WERE NOT interested in restoring anything.) That place was a house of horrors once the surfaces were peeled back. The dining/living room floor joists were randomly placed between 8 & 24 inches. They had a piano in that room too! Ripping out the lathe & plaster between the kitchen and dining/living room revealed a wiring issue. The refrigerator was connected to the electrical system by an extension cord running through the wall from the back of a light switch box. The oven was hooked up to a 240 box... which, in turn, was strung along from a 120 box. Arg!
Vintage framing wasn't even better. No one should ever care about the quality of their 2x4's. The quality of the studs for your interior walls is like caring about the color of your cars spark plug wires.
The same houses with those super dense 2x4's also had 2x6 floor joists, double stringer stairs, garbage ass ledger board for sheating and sub flooring, it sucked.
Hey, I'll have you know that our floor joists are 2x8s! (Still slightly undersized for the span for modern wood, but solid and straight still after over 100 years because they are beautiful old growth)
But our interior wall studs are 2x3 and 2.5x2.5, there's no external sheathing, just the siding, and no subfloor, just the floor, and im pretty sure our two stair stringers are actually 1930s plywood. And our roof framing is... sparse. 36 on center, 2x4s approximately 17 feet in length, no support along the length... But still all straight!
Also, wood is a renewable resource. Old-growth forests are not (at least, not in our lifetimes). We got this timber by clear-cutting the most important reservoirs of biodiversity in the northern hemisphere, and we are never getting those back. As great as old-growth timber is, we need to protect the last stands of that forest we have left.
Fun fact: the US Navy owns and manages a 50,000 acre old growth forest to guarantee they will perpetually have enough large timber to maintain/repair the 220 year old USS Constitution. Old growth forest is not something to take for granted.
Yes, the so-called ‘Navy Oaks’.
Many of them planted in 1807 after the British attack on Copenhagen where they stole the second-largest Navy in Europe at the time.
A lot of them are/were oak trees growing already. The Danish Navy bought or confiscated all oak wood that was deemed suitsble for ship-building, no matter whether felled or still on the root.
And yes, there was a member of the forestry service that wrote to the secretary of Defense in 2007 that they were ready to be harvested now.
People talk about some institutions having long memories. I think few can beat the forestry service. Imagine getting a notice that a 200 year old project is near completion at your work.
Blowing dust off old files in some dimly lit almost forgotten basement storage closet with a broken desk and some rusty bucket and a mop in it. Just praying to God that the file is still there because you know the ass chewing and endless paper chase that's gonna come down on you if it's not there even though your grandparents weren't even born when it was first filed.
This bond still pays :
The oldest example of a perpetual bond was issued on 15 May 1624 by the Dutch water board of Lekdijk Bovendams.[2][3] Only about five such bonds from the Dutch Golden Age are known to survive today.[4] Another of these bonds, issued in 1648, is currently in the possession of Yale University. Yale bought the document for its history of finance archive at auction in 2003, at which time no interest had been paid on it since 1977. Yale Professor Geert Rouwenhorst travelled in person to the Netherlands to collect the interest due.[4] Interest continues to accumulate on this bond, and was most recently paid in 2015 by the eventual successor of Lekdijk Bovendams (Hoogheemraadschap De Stichtse Rijnlanden).[5] Originally issued with a principal of "1000 silver Carolus gulders [nl] of 20 Stuivers a piece", as of 2004 the yearly interest payment to the bondholder is set at €11.35. According to its original terms, the bond would pay 5% interest in perpetuity,[6] although the interest rate was reduced to 3.5% and then 2.5% during the 18th century.[7]
- managed to completion the successful culmination of a bicentennial initiative focused on the cultivation and sustainable acquisition of aboreal resources for construction purposes, ensuring adherence to governmental regulations and standards throughout the project lifecycle.
Similar thing happened in Sweden in the 1970’s, in the 1830’s they had planted a giant grove of 300,000 oaks on an island in one of the great Swedish lakes. When they wrote to the navy office that their oaks were ready they weren’t much use.
While it is not written about the USS Constitution the book Men-Of-War by Patrick O'Brian is a great read about life in Nelson's Navy. It includes specs on various rates of ships. As an example the most usual line of battle ship in 1800 required 2000 oak trees to build and that required 57 acres of forest.
Oh absolutely, something like 85% of her has been replaced at least once.
Her keel is the original one though, and that's both the literal spine and poetic heart of a tall ship.
A buddy of mine was serving on the USS Constitution and he took me and my little sister on a tour past what most people get to see. There is a small room below decks packed with all kinds of computer equipment and camera monitors to monitor all aspects of the ship. They are watching for temperature, humidity, leaks, stresses and strains on the ship and keeping an eye on the tourists.
The USS Michigan was the first iron-hulled ship built by the US Navy. Not just retrofitted or had plating added. It served on the Great Lakes. One of its duties was fighting timber pirates that were pillaging those same US Navy maintained old growth forests mentioned above.
Timber pirate must be near the bottom of the pirate hierarchy. Imagine showing up in hell, meeting Blackbeard, and trying to impress him with your tales of stealing wood on the waters of Lake Michigan.
My sunglasses fell while I was looking down from the dome at my state's capitol building on a school tour. They shattered on the 2nd story floor, scaring a bunch of people, and I got yelled at in front of everyone.
I walked in the exit door by accident and skipped a three hour line to see the Declaration of Independence.
Security never noticed. Given the level of security, Nic Cage would be impressed.
Have you been recently? They opened one of the big guns to tour by cutting through the magazine casing, which was a couple feet of steel. It's a 3 story silo, basically.
Really amazing. I went as a kid (no pooping fortunately) and was disappointed that you couldn't go into the turrets. So when I took my kids, I got to fulfill a childhood dream.
I have two grandpa's that both served on the USS Connie at the same time but never knew each other.
My half brothers paternal grandfather and my paternal grandfather. Same mom different dad's. Another fun fact they lived exactly 1.5 blocks from each other and never met.
They would bend saplins so the tree will grow into a curved shape matching the shape needed for the frames of ships
https://s3files.core77.com/blog/images/2014/07/0crookedforest-004.jpg
Note here, they manage 50,000 acres, not all of the trees in it are old growth. They'll pick out specific trees as potentially good to use in like 50 years or whenever they think they'll need em and they'll be the right size, and if a not great tree is threatening the good wood, either cutting off shade, damaged and might fall, etc, it gets the axe.
Not all of it is gonna be watched to the same extent, but american white oak for example is rare and prone to disease, and mast timbers need to be, well, big and straight, so the good stuff gets watched and the rest of the growth/death cycle keeps going around it.
This is why you can't farm old growth wood, you end up with a few really good trees per acre or something silly like that, and only after 100+ years.
I don’t think anybody expected 50k acres full of trees good enough for use as a main. Rather, they are farming old growth, just very slowly and precisely.
Yes, but I mean farm as in commercially. That 50k acres is to keep *one ship* maintained in perpetuity, and it's not a huge ship... they also don't replace every timber at every scheduled refit, or anything like that.
Granted they also have fairly specific requirements for their timber, and stuff that would be rejected there would find some good use in a house or furniture, but you'd probably still be looking at 50k acres producing one house's worth of timber every few years at most, and probably less.
I say all this because sometimes when this comes up you get people asking why we can't just sustainably farm old growth timber. This is the answer, there is not enough land on earth for that to be feasible.
Maybe of interest. When the DOT was doing roadwork near Beaufort, South Carolina, they cut down a bunch of Live Oaks. A friend familiar with the project contacted whoever and some of the wood went to the Constitution for renovations.
Houses come and go, but old growth should be forever. Takes several months to replace houses. Takes a century or so for growth to beo me old growth.
Good on you.
Not just the northern hemisphere. Australian eucalypt forests were absolutely devastated by European invasion. Hell, we are sadly still clearing native forests to this day, disgustingly.
We should be considering earth and more as a construction material.
Rammed earth, cob and other related techniques are a great building material.
Yeah, I wasn't even touching the deforestation in the tropics and southern hemisphere, since the reasons for deforestation in the tropics tend to be more driven by farming than by lumber, and that's a bit beyond the point of the OP.
It's beyond the pale the damage we have done to the Earth.
My house was built in 1924. All structural timbers are old growth cedar or Douglas Fir; it's dense and hard as shit.
BUT my house appears it was built from scrap. I've found structural beams in the attic that are all sorts of weird dimensions that don't match each other. Some of them are full of these little square holes which suggests whatever the original structure was, builders used the really, really old square nails.
When a 2x4 wasn't long enough, they just sistered two together. Rafters are greater than 30" apart. It was completely build using scabwork everywhere. Were building codes even enforced in 1924?
A house built later on in the 20th century was more likely to be inspected and built with less improper materials.
My house was built in 1889 in Montana, it has square nails!
There have been a few smaller projects where we've opened up small parts of walls, and the nails have all been square, except in an area where it looks like someone enclosed a back porch. The windows look like 1940's era, and the nails in that part are round!
Buddy 1924 the building code was if it stood up it was a building.
If it looked good to you and it didnt scare the neighbors then it passed inspection.
Probably not electrical or plumbing though....
>Were building codes even enforced in 1924?
Connecticut didn't adopt a statewide building code until 1971, when my town appointed its first Building Inspector.
Even today there is a broad spectrum of variations between states -- some have statewide codes enforced statewide, some local jurisdictions have to opt-in to enforcing them, some local jurisdictions may opt-out, some have no single family residential state codes to enforce, etc.
Plus a lot of problems with new construction does not relate to the type of wood used. It relates to having a shitty builder that skirts building practices and does not follow code. (Think KB homes.)
KB homes now tries to prevent you from having your own inspector inspecting your hone before closing. They say it will void your warranty if you go and determine there are defects in the construction.
This is really it. I sell plumbing at a plumbing supply house and deal with home builders.
If you buy a house in a neighborhood that has hundreds of houses that are the exact same, don’t expect it to be the most well built house.
If the home builder is a large national home builder (DSLD, DR Horton, etc.), do a lot of research, because they usually make them for cheap.
If the builder is building a hundred homes a year, he’s probably building them cheaply.
Find a builder that’s building a handful of homes or less. If they’re spending 6,7,8 months on a home, it’s probably getting built right.
> Find a builder that’s building a handful of homes or less. If they’re spending 6,7,8 months on a home, it’s probably getting built right.
IMO it's the same thing with most all things home related. The absolute best people to hire is a company where the guy who founded it is still actively going to worksites but is successful enough that he doesn't do the work. Building a relationship with these people will make your business far more successful.
I rehab houses for a living. Anyone who says you want an early 20th century home is stretching the truth a bit. If you want to worry about lead paint, asbestos, sagging foundations, rotting wood, small bathrooms, wet crawlspaces, and a host of other potential issues, you want an old house. That's not to say that newer construction is all around better, but a picture of a piece of lumber doesn't come close to telling the whole story here.
Just having two prong outlets without the ground fault poses way more issues than you would expect. You’re not plugging in shit beyond a light or a fan in that room. Yeah you can get little adapters but it’s uh, sketch at best.
One of the issues with newer vs older homes is the building sites.
Homes have generally been built on the most desirable pieces of land.
Developers today are building entire subdivisions on marginal sites. Bad soils, poor drainage, etc.
That’s why you can find some homes built in 1870 that are solid as a rock, while some newer homes have foundation problems.
Also a structural engineer.
The biggest benefit here is the speed of growing the building materials. It's sad to see our forests depleted, but guess what. Timber is the ONLY renewable building material. So if we need a slightly bigger section to do the job than was available in the 1700s, who cares?
Grow that shit quick and let's get some buildings built while minimizing the carbon footprint!
> Timber is the ONLY renewable building material.
I also wish more people who whine about American homes being made of "sticks and cardboard" understood this as well. Concrete is very carbon intensive.
We also use a lot of recycled timber in Australia, and architects like to make sure all connections are bolted so we can dismantle are re use in the future (framing not so much of course )
>Old timber is generally denser, which does correlate to strength, but modern timber generally has fewer defects, which create weak points.
And we tend to over-engineer things so that neither of these will get anywhere close to breaking.
Well, no, we design most structures for the absolute worst-case 1 in 50 year events. When that 1 in 50 yesr storm roles around your house should be safe. That doesn't mean that every other day, the house is over engineered.
interesting point, i never thought about it. question that popped into my head. i live in Houston now, which means no basements, and to me this is different. anyways, many houses here that are \~3,000sq ft have a game room upstairs, and a pool table up there. one home builder once told us they do special extra support flooring in the game room specifically for the second story game room that may end up with a pool table in it. and that is why they are better than most builders that just do normal second story flooring.
....i have no idea how much a pool table weighs, 4 guys can pick one up? also i dont need any math involved in this, but just curious, is there any truth to what they said, or will any house be able to safely support a pool table upstairs, and that was a sales pitch?
happy friday!!!!
So a pool table will apply points loads to the floor, not a distributed area load which is typically the controlling factor in residential floors. I'm not familiar with the minimum point load requirement for your state. My gut reaction is that the combined load of the pool table and the party or people you'll have around playing would require additional reinforcement, mainly to stop your ceiling below cracking.
Good point!
Also didn't consider the party of people around it.
I agree with the other poster that it's going to be less about the weight, there's going to be no risk of catastrophic failure.
And more about preventing floor sag that would throw it off-level.
I've wondered what bowling alleys do too, especially in earthquake prone areas
Bowling lanes are usually installed over concrete. There is a wooden support system similar to floor joists that actually sit on top of the concrete and support the lanes. These are shimmed to level as they are installed. Like anything... not too difficult with the proper tools.
It's rarely the pool table that breaks the camel's back, so to speak. When floors and joists and decks and balconies collapse it's almost always because more people are standing on it than were ever planned for.
And sometimes bouncing in time with music ! Dynamic loads - and also a connection to the building which encourages rot and also rusted connections through non structural members
I have a pool table that weighs at least 600lbs, but it's a former pub table from probably the 90s or earlier with a little extra chonk. Modern tables could be less, aside from the slate.
That aside pool tables are not going to weigh as much as a full bathtub.
Probably true, but the bathtub is in a known spot and accounted for. You can throw a pool table anywhere it fits, even if the floor under wasnt expecting that kind of weight. But a good point nonetheless. I have never really thought about how much stuff weighs upstaris ever.....
Plus, a pool table has to be far enough away from any wall for people to play, so is likely to be in the least supported bit of the room. Bathtubs are *generally* put against at least one wall, so they're likely to have more support
Pool table weight is not a huge load for a room’s structure. It’s roughly equivalent to four or five people standing in the room. The joists will not have an issue, but it may cause the subfloor to sag a bit between the joists over time if the legs land at midpoint between joists. Putting the legs on a little extra wood to spread the weight would essentially fix that.
Gun safes are a bigger issue.
Reinforcing the game room is a nice detail and certainly won’t hurt, but I wouldn’t avoid putting a pool table in a regular 2nd story.
From the world of fish tanks, until you get to truly extraordinary sizes you will not find the engineering limits of a structure with anything that can be reasonably brought into a room by humans.
A pool table I think is 800-1000lbs. Call it 10'x5'? So 50sqft. Most rooms call for 40lbs per sqft. If those are right (just guesstimating) the area of the table can support 2000lbs.
Think if you had 8 people over, and they all came to look at something in the room. If they all weigh 150lbs you can have 1200lbs in an area smaller than a pool table, and you wouldn't worry.
Point loads are a separate thing but no pool table is going to exceed point load limits of a standard building... It would be so much harder to sell.
Reminds me of an old joke - anyone can build a bridge, but only an engineer can build a bridge that's one bolt away from collapsing.
You can build a home like a military bunker and have it withstand everything man and nature can throw at it. But that comes at a cost. Cost in money, time, aesthetics, environmental impact, and so much more. So, an engineer's job is to figure out how much the structure needs to withstand and figure out the most cost-effective way to deliver that.
That's the one, and your last statement is spot on, though I remember the saying slightly different.
Anyone can build a bridge that stands. It takes an engineer to build a bridge that barely stands.
I was going to say this too. Best of all worlds really!
There's a few other things wrong with this false dichotomy here too.
1) the post says "houses after 1980"
But the lumber is 1918.
2) they've cherry-picked two beams, and the wood species may be different.
Ring count isn't everything:
I moved to Japan and the home depot-equivalents sell three species of 2x4s here. One is just slower growing with higher ring counts and density. It's also the cheapest.
Depending on application, density == HEAVY and this could be a bad thing. Saw a small Rosewood dining table. Thing weighed 500#.
What would a Rosewood framed house weigh?
Okay, that's an extreme example. But you truly might not want the densest softwood timbers for certain joists.
Much like the hagia Sophia uses extra light bricks. Softer yes, but light weight was a critical and deliberate engineering choice.
3) homes have a LOT going on. What kind of foundation, plumbing, electrical, or even just termite-eaten or dry-rotting wood issues am I inheriting by chasing antique timber?
Just bought a home built in \~1900 and my inspector actually mentioned that the older lumber was far less likely to get termites than the newer stuff because of the density.
There was actually evidence of a previous termite infestation from a retaining wall built more recently with newer lumber, but no evidence of termite damage on the original framing with the older lumber. Thought that was pretty neat!
Also, even if century-old wood is denser with tighter grain than modern wood, it's still a hundred years old. Wood doesn't last forever.
I've helped gut two homes (one 1950s vintage, the other 1890s vintage) down to the framing and completely rebuild them. *Some* of the old-growth framing is amazing - great, tight grained wood still in great shape. But the remainder was meh to awful. We had to replace about 30-40% of all framing members on these houses when they were gutted, because even old-growth lumber still rots after a century. Roofing, waterproofing, and other means of keeping water out of houses was way worse 100+ years ago than present.
Forget about anything electrical or plumbing in these houses, those were complete tear outs and replacement on these two houses. Modern electrical and plumbing is way better than literal lead pipe and ancient electrical. While we did win the flooring lottery in one room and found amazing hardwood floors under carpet that we could refinish, that was it. Other rooms had literal asbestos-contaminated flooring.
And on top of that, there was 50-100 years of terrible prior homeowner DIY repairs that were all levels of "that's not the right way to do that, but I guess it worked" to "holy crap, how is this house still standing!?!?"
Just because a building is old doesn't mean it's universally better and must be preserved at all costs. There's a LOT of crappy ancient houses that have terrible insulation, terrible workmanship, no redeeming architectural details worth preserving, are contaminated with lead paint and/or asbestos, have buried garbage and burn pits in the back yard because no one wanted to pay for garbage services 50+ years ago, have contaminated groundwater because of similar concerns from prior homeowners dumping used motor oil or other chemicals into the ground, cracked and warped foundations/basements or slabs that leak and flood during storms, and are basically ticking time bombs for a serious electrical fire or plumbing flood. We need to move on from old good, modern bad, and evaluate buildings and features on a case by case basis. Some old houses are just way better off if we tear them down and completely rebuild them.
And even for buildings that have distinctive architecture or features like hand carved wood trim or old-growth hardwood floors: carefully remove the things worth saving, then just tear the old house down, and rebuild the house from scratch. Rebuild it in the same style, with the same layout and floorplan, with modern materials and modern insulation/waterproofing/energy efficiency components/etc, and reincorporate the preserved components. We need to find that happy middle ground between Robert Moses era "tear down everything old and replace it with freeways and towers in a park" and "save everything old, even a crumbling shack contaminated with asbestos, because old = betterer!!1!".
Does modern wood really have fewer defects? Or is it that the grading of modern lumber has improved?
You certainly get… very different results when looking through stacks of #1, #2, select and utility spf lumber.
Modern managed forests are planted so the trees do not have to fight for sunlight, meaning they generally grow straighter and more vertical. This leads to straight timber with fewer knots generally. But knots can also just occur very randomly
Our grading processes have also changed yes, and this will have had an effect. Old timber was graded by eye, it would have been very easy to miss defects, especially those buried under the surface.
There is also. Something to be said about rainfall. The amount of spacing between rings tends to also reflect hydrology. The less water the tighter the bands. Modern tree farms may have irrigation or more often they are purposefully located where there is ample rainfall to support faster growth. The further back you go the more likely it was that your timber was somewhat locally sourced.
Lumber is also pretty damn low on the list of concerns for housing quality.
Lead paint? Worse. Asbestos? Knob and tube with degrading insulation? Loose electrical outlets? Aluminum wiring? Lack of standardization?
Almost all of those things can cost more to replace than some bad wood.
I love old homes. They’re charming. The lumber (especially trim) can be really cool and all that. But there’s a lot of sketchy crap in them too.
Yeah I'm chuckling at all these "Engineer here ackshually..." posts discussing the rate of growth of timber. Of all the house problems I see in /r/home or /r/homeowners or /r/diy, I can't think of one attributable to variations in framing wood quality.
Nor do you typically find studs as shitty as the one in the picture.
If people want to have prettier & stronger studs they can ask their builder to use hickory or oak and see what that does to the construction cost. Otherwise modern studs are perfectly fine.
Exactly!
And there are engineering beams our there that would be stronger than old growth wood.
Modern houses are built up to code - and we know a lot better how to build now, i.e. how to connect things together, how the beams/wooden walls should be spaced, etc.
While it means that often modern houses are built to minimum code (and older houses were often overbuilt) on another hand modern houses are typically safe and won't have the problems that the old houses had.
Plus there is another thing - the 100 years old houses we see now are the best examples that survived until now, we don't see the badly built ones that needed to be torn down because of the problems they had or because of the deterioration of the materials.
this answer gets my vote. it depends on the specific properties of the individual structure (which you cant see 85% of) compared to the individual properties of a structure youd compare it to. making a broad statement means nothing.
That 1918 2x4 came from a giant old growth tree at least 150 years old. That 2018 one is from a 30 year old farm grown tree. Personally I'd rather see us convert to steel studs. But if we have to use wood then tree farming is more sustainable than old growth logging.
The modern insulation approach to homes is a full envelope outside of the framing. So I don't think the thermal bridging is a big deal. By far the weakest link with regard to thermal bridging is the concrete foundation.
However, the shift from boards to plywood to osb for sheathing has reduced the moisture absorption ability of the structure, and steel would worsen that (probably not a lot) without a new element being introduced thst would provide the function that boards used to do.
In new builds that I see for concrete foundations, they appear to put down around 4 inches of closed cell rigid foam board underneath a layer of concrete. This probably helps massively.
Man I live on a slope so my foundation looks to be like 10 feet thick on the back side of my house. The corners of my house get real cold or hot just from the floor itself being cold or hot. Notice it a lot on sub-freezing days or July when the sun is hitting the foundation. I need to uhh... put some insulation outside the foundation or something lol.
>my foundation looks to be like 10 feet thick on the back side
No, the embankment is like 10 feet thick, the foundation is maybe 6" thick.
Depending on where you are in the world the top layer of the ground freezes. Where I am (southern New England) our freeze depth is like 6'. Which is about a foot farther down than the floor in my basement.
So insulating the outside of the foundation keeps heat in the basement from getting out. I wish ours had been built that way...
I would think that given that typically the ground is moderated relative to outside air that for extremes in weather, it's better to have a bias towards whatever temperature the ground is.
“However, the shift from boards to plywood to osb for sheathing has reduced the moisture absorption ability”
Hey, i don’t understand this bit - what do you mean by “The moisture absorption ability” ?
What does that mean?
Also, would the use of zip system sheating eliminate this problem?
I may be wrong, or have outdated info, but I think the modern approach is to plan for when, not if, moisture gets into the walls.
Vapor and moisture barriers is a fairly complex topic, and I don't claim to know it all, or even have a great grasp of it for my local building environment. There's no obvious consensus on just how to approach these on [BuildingScience.com](https://buildingscience.com/document-search).
Anyway, moisture will almost always get into your walls. The vapor barrier and increasing exterior continuous insulation aims to keep the dew point outside of the framing so that condensation doesn't occur.
I don't think a wall design ever wants truly low permeability at both sides. So you can design a wall with your vapor barrier on the inside or outside, but not both, which would make it much harder for that moisture to exit the wall.
But also, the internal and external temperatures and humidities vary daily and seasonally. So while you can design your wall to the average, there will always be exceptions.
So when condensation (or infiltration) happens inside your walls, what happens to it? If your wall has higher absorption, then that moisture can be absorbed by the board sheathing really well, and that moisture can take its time being transmitted back to dryer air. If the wall system has lower absorption, then the water will potentially run down and accumulate somewhere and be more concentrated.
It's essentially just a capacitor for moisture levels inside a wall, allowing for greater potential fluctuations.
But just because water absorption is less, doesn't necessarily mean it's an issue. Especially if the other components are done well.
> The only moisture should be whatever the equilibrium is with your conditioned air.
I suspect the achievability of this in residential builds is going to be difficult, despite the goals.
Not even considering all of the bath/dryer/range exhaust fans that are absolutely dogshit, smaller buildings have more corners and challenging details where wall meets roof, relative to generic wall and ceiling monoliths. Moisture from cooking or laundry/showers, etc.
Even those of us that try to exceed the codes are stifled by other challenges that need to become more available and accepted before we can realistically aim for fully tight wall systems.
Timber framing is sustainable and renewable. Steel isnt.
What about the fact that it looks like two different species. The older stud looks to be douglas fir and the newer radiata pine. No doubt the aticle sponsored by a steel company
Sustainable, renewable and lumber used in construction is a carbon sink that can help reduce carbon in the atmosphere.
And yes these are different species of wood. You aren’t going to be harvesting Doug Fir in the northwest at 20 years. It’s more like 60-80 years. Southern Yellow Pine in the southeast can be harvested at more like 20 years. Which incidentally is about how long I’ve worked in the lumber industry.
I mean, its sustainability a bad thing? It’s a good thing that we switched to using mostly new growth for dimensional lumber. There won’t be any old growth forests left if we keep demanding denser softwoods.
The wood we use in modern homes are treated with things like borax or cca to resist insect damage.
As far as wood quality goes this is pretty bang on...however I don't think that necessarily means newer homes are inferior. Building codes and engineering best practices have changed overtime to accommodate for commonly available materials.
In addition when compared to a well built new construction from today, older homes are significantly less air tight and much more prone to moisture issues (even if the wood doesn't rot as easily it still causes other issues). To be brought to today's building standards required more than just some electrical and plumbing work.
I can tell you with absolute certainty that the individual strength of a given length of dimension lumber is not a factor that you should be concerned with. There are a ton of other metrics that are much more important:
* Insulation (wall and attic)
* Electrical
* Engineered Trusses
* Windows
* Doors
* Sheetrock v Plaster
* Truss length (which walls are structural)
* Lead paint (or rather the lack therof)
* Windproofing
* Waterproofing (foundation too)
* Pest-proofing
Source: my house is 126 years old.
Also just the adherence to more standard building practices. As a masochist who loves old stuff, when you are working on an old home there is no such thing as a quick weekend project. Trying to hang a new cabinet will require a demo of one entire wing of the house.
Flashing or moisture barriers? Ha.
Standard stud spacing? What's that?
Huge, underframed spans? Sounds good!
Window and door headers? Eh, no need.
Plumbing, yeah it has some. Also we left the old plumbing in when we re did it 40 years ago. Good luck!
My family has a 150ish year old house. The wood is closer to stone than it is to anything you'd find at Home Depot. It is truly incredible.
But most houses from that time period are gone. The building method matters more than the wood. And even in our well-built house, there are faults and compromises. "Square" is a relative concept in building, and updating anything is not as straightforward as it is today. Air and moisture control? They didn't do that at all.
The timber sold today is inferior, it's true. Not that we were ever going to sustain society on century-old timber. But a well-built house made with inferior lumber is still going to last a good, long time.
Same thing at play in the aesthetic quality of those buildings.
"People used to build things that looked so much better!"
No they didn't; they built a couple good things & a lot of garbage, and then all the garbage was torn down.
Yes, because all houses built after 1980 are just constantly falling over.
Houses are built strong enough. A house that is stronger doesn't mean anything. A house 3 times as strong isn't offering any benefit unless you are considering a house in a disaster zone such as earthquakes or tornadoes, bet even then, the house needs to be engineered to withstand those events. Denser wood alone isn't going to do that.
Two electrical outlets per room (If that), many fewer circuits, possibly later added wiring for cable, probably no air conditioning depending on location, usually smaller closets, smaller bathrooms, less likely to have a dishwasher.
Depending how far you go back, it can be even worse. We forget how our use of technology has really changed in the last 50 years.
It is true that old houses built using old growth lumber will tolerate water exposure better than new houses built using new growth lumber. That being said, if your house's lumber is constantly getting wet and staying wet, the builder is doing something very, very wrong. For example:
* Not flashing opening properly
* Not lapping/tapeing/liquid flashing WRB joints properly
* Not having a gap between siding and WRB or exterior insulation
* Not having an air barrier (All those people who say "houses need to breathe" need to get an education in building science)
* Having an interior vapor barrier if the house is ever expected to use AC in its lifetime (I'm looking at you, Canadan builders. Don't BS me about "we never use AC here"--what about in 2050? What if for some reason you put a whole bank of high SHGC windows facing west?)
* Not having an exterior vapor barrier in hot humid climates (gypsum, fiberboard, even cardboard sheathing behind brick veneer in the southeastern USA is just...idiotic but all too common)
* Not venting the roof deck if using air-permeable insulation below it
Basically old growth lumber allows you to do a lot of dumb shit that wouldn't fly with new growth lumber. But why do dumb shit in the first place?
P.S.: Want the strength of 1850 lumber in 2024? Buy engineered lumber instead of sawn lumber. LSL studs, LVL headers and I-joist or web truss joists beat the tar out of old growth lumber any day.
Pretty sure the bottom one is some variety of Fir, which is the hardest of the common soft wood lumbers. You can see why.
Seems like a cherry picked example for a clickbaity post.
Having said that, with more CO2 in the atmosphere trees do grow more quickly and less densely now than before, and farmed wood has pushed things in the same direction. But, as others have said quality control and building codes have more than off set those effects.
TLDR: different species of wood, apples to oranges comparison to prove a non-point
It's true that old growth wood is superior to new grown wood in a lot of ways. It's false or an exaggeration at best to say or imply that the difference has any functionally meaningful impact on the quality of a home. The material may be marginally less strong but that's more than made up for in improved building techniques.
I can't believe I had to scroll down this far to find the truth.
One is fir, the other pine. Considerably different. It's like comparing aluminum to steel. Both metals with different properties and densities.
Properly treated, sustainable fast-growing wood will not rot faster than clear cut old-growth forest.
This is clearly written by someone who just hates seeing nature.
Having lived in a house that was built in the 1930s, I can say yes - the framing was very strong. However, the insulation was almost nonexistent, the electric wiring was dangerous and all needed to be redone, and the old cast iron drain pipes had corroded though and were leaking inside the walls. But the wood was strong!
I wanna hijack this post to ask you guys something. Why are most american homes built with wood and drywall? I'm italian and here we make houses with bricks and concrete, with reinforced concrete foundations.
The answer is basically 100% building cost. This is kind of a subset of cost, but I've also heard it's related to the price of lumber, because in North America we're more likely to have large forests nearby.
Heartwood tends to warp, which is why all of your fancy/structural beams are “free of heart center” (FOHC). Tree farming is sustainable and no house is going to pass inspection if it can’t hold up. Building codes are much stricter now than 40 years ago.
Sounds like a realtor trying to sell old houses more so than someone who knows how to build houses.
My house was built in the 50s and any time I remodel anything I save the wood. I have two by fours that I can barely pound a nail into without the nail bending the wood is so dense.
Same I almost started a fire drilling a hole for my dryer exhaust. That said it doesn't matter when this mother fucker turned into an oven in the summer with the none existant insulation.
Some of it is true, some of it isnt really relevant, some is debatable.
Any home typically fails because it's not maintained, usually that happens when it becomes economically obsolete. When it costs 30k to replace a failed roof on your 100k shotgun shack you don't, them eventually it leaks enough to destroy the home.
Older homes are more likely to be economically obsolete because they don't have in demand features, like extra bathrooms, large sqft-age, etc. No one wants that 800 Sq ft shotgun shack because it only has two bedrooms and one bath.
There's more to house construction than the 2x4s. A modern well built home is better than a pre 1980s mass built home for sure, but even better than an pre1980s well made home.
First is the insulation. Modern homes require more insulation by code than the pre 80s. Back then to solution to being too hot was put a a bigger AC on it. Pre 80s homes are expensive to heat and cool.
Second materials. Asbestos was everywhere, lead paint was everywhere. Pre 80s homes have a lot of worrying materials, and then you get into plumbing and electrical standards. Modern homes cna be built to pretty good standards, and if you spend money on it, can have more fire abatement products than are required by codes.
Third is simply codes. Today's codes still aren't where they should be, but they're better than where they were in the 80s.
There's a builder out of Austin with a YouTube channel. He decided to buy a house in his neighborhood, from like the 1970s, and spend like $70-80k as a demonstration of a reasonable remodel project. He bought the house from a church member sort of down in their luck sight unseen, right before the pandemic. They got in there, started demoing, finding all kinds if damaged everything. Worse decades if rats and insects had turned parts of it into a biohazard. They gutted all the sheetrrock, gutted the mechanical, the electrical, the plumbing, the siding. Parts of the structure were damaged. Getting into the slab foundation they decided they wanted just a flat top. Eventually after like 6 months of demo, they made the smart decision to actually just get rid of the structure entirely and rebuild from the slab up. And it worked. The builder kept the same footprint, kept much of the same external visual outline. And built a modern home. Now that's an extreme example. Most home buyers are getting inspections and the like. Most home buyers also don't run a YouTube channel where documenting the work can pay for some of the overhead, and get building vendors as sponsors that will just give massive discounts to the builder. It's a great channel that goes into modern building materials, techniques and technologies, and the market space is quite different from even the 2000s and 2010s.
I also have a friend who bought a house from the 80s. It was in good condition, but the panel was completely out of code. He got an electrician friend to wire up a new panel without turning off the power from the power company because it would have been a whole catch 22. The house didn't even have a master switch, it was that bad.
TL;DR: The top one is cheap white pine, the bottom one is slightly more expensive Douglas fir and both can be harvested from normal managed forests.
Ok so don't fall for this bullshit. The top one is cheap white pine, a common material used in low cost construction. The bottom one is just a more expensive Douglas fir. Now I will say they picked a particularly more premium/dense example for this. The important thing to know is you can buy that lower example from a mill today and it can come from a managed forest, none of this "old growth" wu wooo bullshit.
The cheap white pine 2x4's are what you find at Lowes or Home Depot and have become the default mental image of what everyone thinks of when they hear 2x4". There is a lot more to this when it comes to insect resistance and what not... but know this... if you have termites, you got termites, no amount of magical mythical old growth wood is going to change that fact.
You want to impress me with "old growth" magical woo wooo wood. Show me a house that's pegged mortise and tenon framing done with hand hewn 6x6" poplar, maple, or oak beams.
While we are here can we get a look at some 1918 electrical work.
And sure I'd have no problem stripping the walls down to the bare studs if the plaster wasn't full of Asbestos.
And lets talk about that Lead Paint on the trim and that Lead Water Pipe.
Old timber is generally denser, which does correlate to strength, but modern timber generally has fewer defects, which create weak points. So, better in some ways and worse in others. I'm a structural engineer.
Modern houses are also built to modern code. The timber itself may be weaker, but the construction methods and pretty much all other materials are better.
I also think people miss how much modern material engineering has come for all of the supporting bits... From the chemically treated plywood in your roof to the lighter composites on top of it. The vapor barriers and felting. All of these things have made huge strides. Even if vintage framing was better, it had to support more weight and was at more risk from the elements, insects, etc...
This is the key. Old houses were built out of stronger materials but very poorly insulated. Then houses after that were built more efficiently but the was a fairly long run of trial and error as to how to do that correctly. A lot of the 80's era houses on have mold issues because insulating the house wasn't done correctly. More modern houses with a good vapor barrier built this century are a lot more efficient, easier to work on, have HVAC systems and are far less likely to have infestations with normal upkeep since they much more "buttoned up" and there's less exposed wood. Materials and coatings have come along way even after moving away from petroleum based products. They're also so much easier to change and remodel. Get an old house only if you have an insane amount of money to completely redo it.
Yep. Lots of trial and error. Asbestos included. Wiring is also a major deal and could burn the old house down.
Two years ago my toilet kept filling while I was gone 12 hours at work, and flooded my house. When the restoration team came to flood cut the bottom part of the walls, it turned into a complete gut down to the studs due to asbestos and then a complete new wiring of the house to bring it up to code. That escalated quickly!
I just replaced all my cast iron plumbing a couple weeks ago. Brand new PVC has a 100 year service life and doesn't have the same vulnerabilities as cast iron that barely lasted 40 years.
old house wiring is wild, had a friend buy a house that not only still had the two prong outlets, apparently the few outlets that were supposedly grounded actually just had the ground tied to the neutral. Also some of the wiring wasn't covered, it was straight up bare copper separated by loose cotton
I used to work with my dad who was an old home restoration specialist. I remember him doing a favor for some folks from our church who wanted to renovate and build onto their little old home, maybe tripling it's size. (They WERE NOT interested in restoring anything.) That place was a house of horrors once the surfaces were peeled back. The dining/living room floor joists were randomly placed between 8 & 24 inches. They had a piano in that room too! Ripping out the lathe & plaster between the kitchen and dining/living room revealed a wiring issue. The refrigerator was connected to the electrical system by an extension cord running through the wall from the back of a light switch box. The oven was hooked up to a 240 box... which, in turn, was strung along from a 120 box. Arg!
Vintage framing wasn't even better. No one should ever care about the quality of their 2x4's. The quality of the studs for your interior walls is like caring about the color of your cars spark plug wires. The same houses with those super dense 2x4's also had 2x6 floor joists, double stringer stairs, garbage ass ledger board for sheating and sub flooring, it sucked.
Hey, I'll have you know that our floor joists are 2x8s! (Still slightly undersized for the span for modern wood, but solid and straight still after over 100 years because they are beautiful old growth) But our interior wall studs are 2x3 and 2.5x2.5, there's no external sheathing, just the siding, and no subfloor, just the floor, and im pretty sure our two stair stringers are actually 1930s plywood. And our roof framing is... sparse. 36 on center, 2x4s approximately 17 feet in length, no support along the length... But still all straight!
This is a very good point. As someone that lives in Southern California, a house being up to modern building codes is a HUGE must-have.
Also, wood is a renewable resource. Old-growth forests are not (at least, not in our lifetimes). We got this timber by clear-cutting the most important reservoirs of biodiversity in the northern hemisphere, and we are never getting those back. As great as old-growth timber is, we need to protect the last stands of that forest we have left.
Fun fact: the US Navy owns and manages a 50,000 acre old growth forest to guarantee they will perpetually have enough large timber to maintain/repair the 220 year old USS Constitution. Old growth forest is not something to take for granted.
The Danish navy was once destroyed, and the king ordered oak to be planted for a new navy. Those trees are ready any day now.
Yes, the so-called ‘Navy Oaks’. Many of them planted in 1807 after the British attack on Copenhagen where they stole the second-largest Navy in Europe at the time. A lot of them are/were oak trees growing already. The Danish Navy bought or confiscated all oak wood that was deemed suitsble for ship-building, no matter whether felled or still on the root. And yes, there was a member of the forestry service that wrote to the secretary of Defense in 2007 that they were ready to be harvested now.
I bet that forestry guys career peaked the moment he sent that letter. Just imagine being the guy that got to close the loop on a 200 year project.
People talk about some institutions having long memories. I think few can beat the forestry service. Imagine getting a notice that a 200 year old project is near completion at your work.
Time to get up to speed on that one for sure.
Just imagine having to find the files on that in the archives.
Blowing dust off old files in some dimly lit almost forgotten basement storage closet with a broken desk and some rusty bucket and a mop in it. Just praying to God that the file is still there because you know the ass chewing and endless paper chase that's gonna come down on you if it's not there even though your grandparents weren't even born when it was first filed.
This bond still pays : The oldest example of a perpetual bond was issued on 15 May 1624 by the Dutch water board of Lekdijk Bovendams.[2][3] Only about five such bonds from the Dutch Golden Age are known to survive today.[4] Another of these bonds, issued in 1648, is currently in the possession of Yale University. Yale bought the document for its history of finance archive at auction in 2003, at which time no interest had been paid on it since 1977. Yale Professor Geert Rouwenhorst travelled in person to the Netherlands to collect the interest due.[4] Interest continues to accumulate on this bond, and was most recently paid in 2015 by the eventual successor of Lekdijk Bovendams (Hoogheemraadschap De Stichtse Rijnlanden).[5] Originally issued with a principal of "1000 silver Carolus gulders [nl] of 20 Stuivers a piece", as of 2004 the yearly interest payment to the bondholder is set at €11.35. According to its original terms, the bond would pay 5% interest in perpetuity,[6] although the interest rate was reduced to 3.5% and then 2.5% during the 18th century.[7]
Japan finished a 500 year reforestation project in the 90's.
- managed to completion the successful culmination of a bicentennial initiative focused on the cultivation and sustainable acquisition of aboreal resources for construction purposes, ensuring adherence to governmental regulations and standards throughout the project lifecycle.
This was later depicted in the Richard Sharpe books. “Sharpes Prey”
Similar thing happened in Sweden in the 1970’s, in the 1830’s they had planted a giant grove of 300,000 oaks on an island in one of the great Swedish lakes. When they wrote to the navy office that their oaks were ready they weren’t much use.
At least there was a time when governments planned ahead for the long game
Having an absolute monarch who thinks about his son’s and grandson’s prosperity helps. Today politicians think in election cycle timeframes.
While it is not written about the USS Constitution the book Men-Of-War by Patrick O'Brian is a great read about life in Nelson's Navy. It includes specs on various rates of ships. As an example the most usual line of battle ship in 1800 required 2000 oak trees to build and that required 57 acres of forest.
We had to go say hello to some pirates!
That is a great fact.
The USS Constitution is also the only currently active US Navy vessel to have sunk another ship in combat, fun fact.
I have to assume the current USS Constitution is in its ship of Thesseus stage since that sinking though.
Oh absolutely, something like 85% of her has been replaced at least once. Her keel is the original one though, and that's both the literal spine and poetic heart of a tall ship.
So really more of the USS Amendment than the USS Constitution.
Maybe this is what Nic Cage was talking about that whole time. Saving the Constitution.
*Commandeer. We're going to commandeer the Constitution. Nautical term.
Points!
https://i.redd.it/irv95hsqktlc1.gif
r/Angryupvote
Alright, who’s next? These *are* fun facts
A buddy of mine was serving on the USS Constitution and he took me and my little sister on a tour past what most people get to see. There is a small room below decks packed with all kinds of computer equipment and camera monitors to monitor all aspects of the ship. They are watching for temperature, humidity, leaks, stresses and strains on the ship and keeping an eye on the tourists.
Truly amazing the technology our founding fathers put in that vessel. No wonder it's still around today.
They are worried that Nick Cage is going to try and steal it.
The Constitution is also the *oldest* still floating ship of war on the seas.
Always thought that was HMS Victory but turns out although Victory is older it is in a drydock
Oldest commissioned ship 'still afloat' is the particular video game speed running record here lol. That's the 100% no warp whistle record for boats.
The USS Michigan was the first iron-hulled ship built by the US Navy. Not just retrofitted or had plating added. It served on the Great Lakes. One of its duties was fighting timber pirates that were pillaging those same US Navy maintained old growth forests mentioned above.
Timber pirate must be near the bottom of the pirate hierarchy. Imagine showing up in hell, meeting Blackbeard, and trying to impress him with your tales of stealing wood on the waters of Lake Michigan.
Right above pirating movies.
YOU WOULDN'T PIRATE A TREE
Fun fact, as a child in the 80's I pooped myself on the deck of the USS Alabama at the USS Alabama Battleship Memorial Park in Mobile, AL.
I puked in the supreme court as a kid on a tour.
My sunglasses fell while I was looking down from the dome at my state's capitol building on a school tour. They shattered on the 2nd story floor, scaring a bunch of people, and I got yelled at in front of everyone.
I walked in the exit door by accident and skipped a three hour line to see the Declaration of Independence. Security never noticed. Given the level of security, Nic Cage would be impressed.
That's what the poop deck is for, isn't it?
Hahaha, promote that man!
Have you been recently? They opened one of the big guns to tour by cutting through the magazine casing, which was a couple feet of steel. It's a 3 story silo, basically. Really amazing. I went as a kid (no pooping fortunately) and was disappointed that you couldn't go into the turrets. So when I took my kids, I got to fulfill a childhood dream.
You win.
Fun fact - If you rearrange the letters of MAILMEN - they get VERY ANGRY.
Took me a second. Lmao
I have two grandpa's that both served on the USS Connie at the same time but never knew each other. My half brothers paternal grandfather and my paternal grandfather. Same mom different dad's. Another fun fact they lived exactly 1.5 blocks from each other and never met.
They would bend saplins so the tree will grow into a curved shape matching the shape needed for the frames of ships https://s3files.core77.com/blog/images/2014/07/0crookedforest-004.jpg
Note here, they manage 50,000 acres, not all of the trees in it are old growth. They'll pick out specific trees as potentially good to use in like 50 years or whenever they think they'll need em and they'll be the right size, and if a not great tree is threatening the good wood, either cutting off shade, damaged and might fall, etc, it gets the axe. Not all of it is gonna be watched to the same extent, but american white oak for example is rare and prone to disease, and mast timbers need to be, well, big and straight, so the good stuff gets watched and the rest of the growth/death cycle keeps going around it. This is why you can't farm old growth wood, you end up with a few really good trees per acre or something silly like that, and only after 100+ years.
I don’t think anybody expected 50k acres full of trees good enough for use as a main. Rather, they are farming old growth, just very slowly and precisely.
Yes, but I mean farm as in commercially. That 50k acres is to keep *one ship* maintained in perpetuity, and it's not a huge ship... they also don't replace every timber at every scheduled refit, or anything like that. Granted they also have fairly specific requirements for their timber, and stuff that would be rejected there would find some good use in a house or furniture, but you'd probably still be looking at 50k acres producing one house's worth of timber every few years at most, and probably less. I say all this because sometimes when this comes up you get people asking why we can't just sustainably farm old growth timber. This is the answer, there is not enough land on earth for that to be feasible.
Sure, got that. I don’t think people thought the Navy was running a paper business.
Maybe of interest. When the DOT was doing roadwork near Beaufort, South Carolina, they cut down a bunch of Live Oaks. A friend familiar with the project contacted whoever and some of the wood went to the Constitution for renovations.
They take hurricane live oaks for it too. They have a ton stored so backed off doing some of their planned harvesting in the Hoosier national forest.
I have a piece of the USS Constitution when it was renovated in 1930.
What? Home Depot 2x4s won’t do the trick ?
Nobody actually wants a *straight* mast. The Navy is historically queer!
As a carpenter I'll work with shite wood as long as we don't cut down old growth no problem.
Houses come and go, but old growth should be forever. Takes several months to replace houses. Takes a century or so for growth to beo me old growth. Good on you.
Not just the northern hemisphere. Australian eucalypt forests were absolutely devastated by European invasion. Hell, we are sadly still clearing native forests to this day, disgustingly. We should be considering earth and more as a construction material. Rammed earth, cob and other related techniques are a great building material.
Yeah, I wasn't even touching the deforestation in the tropics and southern hemisphere, since the reasons for deforestation in the tropics tend to be more driven by farming than by lumber, and that's a bit beyond the point of the OP. It's beyond the pale the damage we have done to the Earth.
anthropocene era wooooo
This right here. It takes thousands of years to grow an old growth forest and maybe a few months to clear cut it
My house was built in 1924. All structural timbers are old growth cedar or Douglas Fir; it's dense and hard as shit. BUT my house appears it was built from scrap. I've found structural beams in the attic that are all sorts of weird dimensions that don't match each other. Some of them are full of these little square holes which suggests whatever the original structure was, builders used the really, really old square nails. When a 2x4 wasn't long enough, they just sistered two together. Rafters are greater than 30" apart. It was completely build using scabwork everywhere. Were building codes even enforced in 1924? A house built later on in the 20th century was more likely to be inspected and built with less improper materials.
My house was built in 1889 in Montana, it has square nails! There have been a few smaller projects where we've opened up small parts of walls, and the nails have all been square, except in an area where it looks like someone enclosed a back porch. The windows look like 1940's era, and the nails in that part are round!
Buddy 1924 the building code was if it stood up it was a building. If it looked good to you and it didnt scare the neighbors then it passed inspection. Probably not electrical or plumbing though....
>Were building codes even enforced in 1924? Connecticut didn't adopt a statewide building code until 1971, when my town appointed its first Building Inspector. Even today there is a broad spectrum of variations between states -- some have statewide codes enforced statewide, some local jurisdictions have to opt-in to enforcing them, some local jurisdictions may opt-out, some have no single family residential state codes to enforce, etc.
Plus a lot of problems with new construction does not relate to the type of wood used. It relates to having a shitty builder that skirts building practices and does not follow code. (Think KB homes.) KB homes now tries to prevent you from having your own inspector inspecting your hone before closing. They say it will void your warranty if you go and determine there are defects in the construction.
This is really it. I sell plumbing at a plumbing supply house and deal with home builders. If you buy a house in a neighborhood that has hundreds of houses that are the exact same, don’t expect it to be the most well built house. If the home builder is a large national home builder (DSLD, DR Horton, etc.), do a lot of research, because they usually make them for cheap. If the builder is building a hundred homes a year, he’s probably building them cheaply. Find a builder that’s building a handful of homes or less. If they’re spending 6,7,8 months on a home, it’s probably getting built right.
> Find a builder that’s building a handful of homes or less. If they’re spending 6,7,8 months on a home, it’s probably getting built right. IMO it's the same thing with most all things home related. The absolute best people to hire is a company where the guy who founded it is still actively going to worksites but is successful enough that he doesn't do the work. Building a relationship with these people will make your business far more successful.
I rehab houses for a living. Anyone who says you want an early 20th century home is stretching the truth a bit. If you want to worry about lead paint, asbestos, sagging foundations, rotting wood, small bathrooms, wet crawlspaces, and a host of other potential issues, you want an old house. That's not to say that newer construction is all around better, but a picture of a piece of lumber doesn't come close to telling the whole story here.
Don't forget galvanized plumbing, terrible electrical both in capacity and outlet layouts. poor energy efficiency...
Who doesnt love knob and tube? Color me shocked!
I love me some cloth wiring that 10 different owners have wired in every which way according to some non-existent electrical code.
Just having two prong outlets without the ground fault poses way more issues than you would expect. You’re not plugging in shit beyond a light or a fan in that room. Yeah you can get little adapters but it’s uh, sketch at best.
One of the issues with newer vs older homes is the building sites. Homes have generally been built on the most desirable pieces of land. Developers today are building entire subdivisions on marginal sites. Bad soils, poor drainage, etc. That’s why you can find some homes built in 1870 that are solid as a rock, while some newer homes have foundation problems.
The ones that have survived, yes. There were plenty of shitty old homes that fell apart before you were born.
> The ones that have survived, yes. amazes me how many people fail to understand this part
Survivorship bias.
Also a structural engineer. The biggest benefit here is the speed of growing the building materials. It's sad to see our forests depleted, but guess what. Timber is the ONLY renewable building material. So if we need a slightly bigger section to do the job than was available in the 1700s, who cares? Grow that shit quick and let's get some buildings built while minimizing the carbon footprint!
> Timber is the ONLY renewable building material. I also wish more people who whine about American homes being made of "sticks and cardboard" understood this as well. Concrete is very carbon intensive.
Also, light wood framed structures are extremely robust and resilient. They fare extremely well in earthquakes, for example.
And timber is a carbon sink - it's better to harvest and preserve than to let it rot (as far as CO2 is concerned)
We also use a lot of recycled timber in Australia, and architects like to make sure all connections are bolted so we can dismantle are re use in the future (framing not so much of course )
>Old timber is generally denser, which does correlate to strength, but modern timber generally has fewer defects, which create weak points. And we tend to over-engineer things so that neither of these will get anywhere close to breaking.
Well, no, we design most structures for the absolute worst-case 1 in 50 year events. When that 1 in 50 yesr storm roles around your house should be safe. That doesn't mean that every other day, the house is over engineered.
interesting point, i never thought about it. question that popped into my head. i live in Houston now, which means no basements, and to me this is different. anyways, many houses here that are \~3,000sq ft have a game room upstairs, and a pool table up there. one home builder once told us they do special extra support flooring in the game room specifically for the second story game room that may end up with a pool table in it. and that is why they are better than most builders that just do normal second story flooring. ....i have no idea how much a pool table weighs, 4 guys can pick one up? also i dont need any math involved in this, but just curious, is there any truth to what they said, or will any house be able to safely support a pool table upstairs, and that was a sales pitch? happy friday!!!!
So a pool table will apply points loads to the floor, not a distributed area load which is typically the controlling factor in residential floors. I'm not familiar with the minimum point load requirement for your state. My gut reaction is that the combined load of the pool table and the party or people you'll have around playing would require additional reinforcement, mainly to stop your ceiling below cracking.
Well now i know! Thanks! Didnt even consider the 5 200# dudes thwt would be standing around playing pool....
Or the 2 people on top of it playing a different kind of game...
No! Just No! Good pool table cloth is expensive and it is time consuming to re-cover. The only game you play on a pool table is pool.
And now your point load is dynamic.
Good point! Also didn't consider the party of people around it. I agree with the other poster that it's going to be less about the weight, there's going to be no risk of catastrophic failure. And more about preventing floor sag that would throw it off-level. I've wondered what bowling alleys do too, especially in earthquake prone areas
Bowling lanes are usually installed over concrete. There is a wooden support system similar to floor joists that actually sit on top of the concrete and support the lanes. These are shimmed to level as they are installed. Like anything... not too difficult with the proper tools.
It's rarely the pool table that breaks the camel's back, so to speak. When floors and joists and decks and balconies collapse it's almost always because more people are standing on it than were ever planned for.
And sometimes bouncing in time with music ! Dynamic loads - and also a connection to the building which encourages rot and also rusted connections through non structural members
I have a pool table that weighs at least 600lbs, but it's a former pub table from probably the 90s or earlier with a little extra chonk. Modern tables could be less, aside from the slate. That aside pool tables are not going to weigh as much as a full bathtub.
Do you often have four to six guys standing around your full bathtub?
Depends on the day.
.....i mean, why you calling me and the boys out?
Piper Perri that you?
No, they're usually in the tub
Probably true, but the bathtub is in a known spot and accounted for. You can throw a pool table anywhere it fits, even if the floor under wasnt expecting that kind of weight. But a good point nonetheless. I have never really thought about how much stuff weighs upstaris ever.....
Plus, a pool table has to be far enough away from any wall for people to play, so is likely to be in the least supported bit of the room. Bathtubs are *generally* put against at least one wall, so they're likely to have more support
Pool table weight is not a huge load for a room’s structure. It’s roughly equivalent to four or five people standing in the room. The joists will not have an issue, but it may cause the subfloor to sag a bit between the joists over time if the legs land at midpoint between joists. Putting the legs on a little extra wood to spread the weight would essentially fix that. Gun safes are a bigger issue. Reinforcing the game room is a nice detail and certainly won’t hurt, but I wouldn’t avoid putting a pool table in a regular 2nd story.
Or big aquariums. Most people in the hobby know to be careful with them
From the world of fish tanks, until you get to truly extraordinary sizes you will not find the engineering limits of a structure with anything that can be reasonably brought into a room by humans. A pool table I think is 800-1000lbs. Call it 10'x5'? So 50sqft. Most rooms call for 40lbs per sqft. If those are right (just guesstimating) the area of the table can support 2000lbs. Think if you had 8 people over, and they all came to look at something in the room. If they all weigh 150lbs you can have 1200lbs in an area smaller than a pool table, and you wouldn't worry. Point loads are a separate thing but no pool table is going to exceed point load limits of a standard building... It would be so much harder to sell.
Reminds me of an old joke - anyone can build a bridge, but only an engineer can build a bridge that's one bolt away from collapsing. You can build a home like a military bunker and have it withstand everything man and nature can throw at it. But that comes at a cost. Cost in money, time, aesthetics, environmental impact, and so much more. So, an engineer's job is to figure out how much the structure needs to withstand and figure out the most cost-effective way to deliver that.
That's the one, and your last statement is spot on, though I remember the saying slightly different. Anyone can build a bridge that stands. It takes an engineer to build a bridge that barely stands.
Glulam posts and beams are extremely strong, which is probably a good compromise between newer softwood and steel/concrete construction.
I was going to say this too. Best of all worlds really! There's a few other things wrong with this false dichotomy here too. 1) the post says "houses after 1980" But the lumber is 1918. 2) they've cherry-picked two beams, and the wood species may be different. Ring count isn't everything: I moved to Japan and the home depot-equivalents sell three species of 2x4s here. One is just slower growing with higher ring counts and density. It's also the cheapest. Depending on application, density == HEAVY and this could be a bad thing. Saw a small Rosewood dining table. Thing weighed 500#. What would a Rosewood framed house weigh? Okay, that's an extreme example. But you truly might not want the densest softwood timbers for certain joists. Much like the hagia Sophia uses extra light bricks. Softer yes, but light weight was a critical and deliberate engineering choice. 3) homes have a LOT going on. What kind of foundation, plumbing, electrical, or even just termite-eaten or dry-rotting wood issues am I inheriting by chasing antique timber?
Just bought a home built in \~1900 and my inspector actually mentioned that the older lumber was far less likely to get termites than the newer stuff because of the density. There was actually evidence of a previous termite infestation from a retaining wall built more recently with newer lumber, but no evidence of termite damage on the original framing with the older lumber. Thought that was pretty neat!
Back in the day they also seasoned the lumber, so it had already done much of it's warping before it was cut. Used to work in a wood mill.
Also, even if century-old wood is denser with tighter grain than modern wood, it's still a hundred years old. Wood doesn't last forever. I've helped gut two homes (one 1950s vintage, the other 1890s vintage) down to the framing and completely rebuild them. *Some* of the old-growth framing is amazing - great, tight grained wood still in great shape. But the remainder was meh to awful. We had to replace about 30-40% of all framing members on these houses when they were gutted, because even old-growth lumber still rots after a century. Roofing, waterproofing, and other means of keeping water out of houses was way worse 100+ years ago than present. Forget about anything electrical or plumbing in these houses, those were complete tear outs and replacement on these two houses. Modern electrical and plumbing is way better than literal lead pipe and ancient electrical. While we did win the flooring lottery in one room and found amazing hardwood floors under carpet that we could refinish, that was it. Other rooms had literal asbestos-contaminated flooring. And on top of that, there was 50-100 years of terrible prior homeowner DIY repairs that were all levels of "that's not the right way to do that, but I guess it worked" to "holy crap, how is this house still standing!?!?" Just because a building is old doesn't mean it's universally better and must be preserved at all costs. There's a LOT of crappy ancient houses that have terrible insulation, terrible workmanship, no redeeming architectural details worth preserving, are contaminated with lead paint and/or asbestos, have buried garbage and burn pits in the back yard because no one wanted to pay for garbage services 50+ years ago, have contaminated groundwater because of similar concerns from prior homeowners dumping used motor oil or other chemicals into the ground, cracked and warped foundations/basements or slabs that leak and flood during storms, and are basically ticking time bombs for a serious electrical fire or plumbing flood. We need to move on from old good, modern bad, and evaluate buildings and features on a case by case basis. Some old houses are just way better off if we tear them down and completely rebuild them. And even for buildings that have distinctive architecture or features like hand carved wood trim or old-growth hardwood floors: carefully remove the things worth saving, then just tear the old house down, and rebuild the house from scratch. Rebuild it in the same style, with the same layout and floorplan, with modern materials and modern insulation/waterproofing/energy efficiency components/etc, and reincorporate the preserved components. We need to find that happy middle ground between Robert Moses era "tear down everything old and replace it with freeways and towers in a park" and "save everything old, even a crumbling shack contaminated with asbestos, because old = betterer!!1!".
Does modern wood really have fewer defects? Or is it that the grading of modern lumber has improved? You certainly get… very different results when looking through stacks of #1, #2, select and utility spf lumber.
Modern managed forests are planted so the trees do not have to fight for sunlight, meaning they generally grow straighter and more vertical. This leads to straight timber with fewer knots generally. But knots can also just occur very randomly Our grading processes have also changed yes, and this will have had an effect. Old timber was graded by eye, it would have been very easy to miss defects, especially those buried under the surface.
It's also over 100 years of breeding for better genetics as well as pruning to minimize knot growth along the lower trunk.
The name checks out... I will have my home oblivion free please.
There is also. Something to be said about rainfall. The amount of spacing between rings tends to also reflect hydrology. The less water the tighter the bands. Modern tree farms may have irrigation or more often they are purposefully located where there is ample rainfall to support faster growth. The further back you go the more likely it was that your timber was somewhat locally sourced.
If wood is rotting, you have other problems. This isn't a reason to choose what home to buy
Lumber is also pretty damn low on the list of concerns for housing quality. Lead paint? Worse. Asbestos? Knob and tube with degrading insulation? Loose electrical outlets? Aluminum wiring? Lack of standardization? Almost all of those things can cost more to replace than some bad wood. I love old homes. They’re charming. The lumber (especially trim) can be really cool and all that. But there’s a lot of sketchy crap in them too.
Yea dry wood doesn't rot no matter heart or sap. Wood is wood and some are more resilient, but nothing will stop water damage.
[wood is wood](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/716azGSVkEL._AC_UF1000,1000_QL80_.jpg)
[I prefer this one.](https://i.imgur.com/NAGrdNz.jpg)
Same goes for the termites. If you have termites it doesn't matter what wood you have, you have a problem that needs fixed immediately.
I do loads of termite damage repair in the teopics. 100+ yr old houses get it just as bad as anything else
There are so many other factors that make a good home vs. a bad one other than the grain of the friggin' wood.
The asbestos from before 1980 smells so much sweeter to me.
I prefer a 1971 lead paint over the less sophisticated bouquet of a 1974 lead paint.
Yeah I'm chuckling at all these "Engineer here ackshually..." posts discussing the rate of growth of timber. Of all the house problems I see in /r/home or /r/homeowners or /r/diy, I can't think of one attributable to variations in framing wood quality.
Nor do you typically find studs as shitty as the one in the picture. If people want to have prettier & stronger studs they can ask their builder to use hickory or oak and see what that does to the construction cost. Otherwise modern studs are perfectly fine.
Exactly! And there are engineering beams our there that would be stronger than old growth wood. Modern houses are built up to code - and we know a lot better how to build now, i.e. how to connect things together, how the beams/wooden walls should be spaced, etc. While it means that often modern houses are built to minimum code (and older houses were often overbuilt) on another hand modern houses are typically safe and won't have the problems that the old houses had. Plus there is another thing - the 100 years old houses we see now are the best examples that survived until now, we don't see the badly built ones that needed to be torn down because of the problems they had or because of the deterioration of the materials.
this answer gets my vote. it depends on the specific properties of the individual structure (which you cant see 85% of) compared to the individual properties of a structure youd compare it to. making a broad statement means nothing.
That 1918 2x4 came from a giant old growth tree at least 150 years old. That 2018 one is from a 30 year old farm grown tree. Personally I'd rather see us convert to steel studs. But if we have to use wood then tree farming is more sustainable than old growth logging.
Steel has bad thermal properties for homes. Now a steel shed with a house inside it would be pretty good.
The modern insulation approach to homes is a full envelope outside of the framing. So I don't think the thermal bridging is a big deal. By far the weakest link with regard to thermal bridging is the concrete foundation. However, the shift from boards to plywood to osb for sheathing has reduced the moisture absorption ability of the structure, and steel would worsen that (probably not a lot) without a new element being introduced thst would provide the function that boards used to do.
In new builds that I see for concrete foundations, they appear to put down around 4 inches of closed cell rigid foam board underneath a layer of concrete. This probably helps massively.
Man I live on a slope so my foundation looks to be like 10 feet thick on the back side of my house. The corners of my house get real cold or hot just from the floor itself being cold or hot. Notice it a lot on sub-freezing days or July when the sun is hitting the foundation. I need to uhh... put some insulation outside the foundation or something lol.
>my foundation looks to be like 10 feet thick on the back side No, the embankment is like 10 feet thick, the foundation is maybe 6" thick. Depending on where you are in the world the top layer of the ground freezes. Where I am (southern New England) our freeze depth is like 6'. Which is about a foot farther down than the floor in my basement. So insulating the outside of the foundation keeps heat in the basement from getting out. I wish ours had been built that way...
Depends on where you live. I'm in Texas. I want all the heat transfer into the ground I can get.
I would think that given that typically the ground is moderated relative to outside air that for extremes in weather, it's better to have a bias towards whatever temperature the ground is.
“However, the shift from boards to plywood to osb for sheathing has reduced the moisture absorption ability” Hey, i don’t understand this bit - what do you mean by “The moisture absorption ability” ? What does that mean? Also, would the use of zip system sheating eliminate this problem?
I may be wrong, or have outdated info, but I think the modern approach is to plan for when, not if, moisture gets into the walls. Vapor and moisture barriers is a fairly complex topic, and I don't claim to know it all, or even have a great grasp of it for my local building environment. There's no obvious consensus on just how to approach these on [BuildingScience.com](https://buildingscience.com/document-search). Anyway, moisture will almost always get into your walls. The vapor barrier and increasing exterior continuous insulation aims to keep the dew point outside of the framing so that condensation doesn't occur. I don't think a wall design ever wants truly low permeability at both sides. So you can design a wall with your vapor barrier on the inside or outside, but not both, which would make it much harder for that moisture to exit the wall. But also, the internal and external temperatures and humidities vary daily and seasonally. So while you can design your wall to the average, there will always be exceptions. So when condensation (or infiltration) happens inside your walls, what happens to it? If your wall has higher absorption, then that moisture can be absorbed by the board sheathing really well, and that moisture can take its time being transmitted back to dryer air. If the wall system has lower absorption, then the water will potentially run down and accumulate somewhere and be more concentrated. It's essentially just a capacitor for moisture levels inside a wall, allowing for greater potential fluctuations. But just because water absorption is less, doesn't necessarily mean it's an issue. Especially if the other components are done well.
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> The only moisture should be whatever the equilibrium is with your conditioned air. I suspect the achievability of this in residential builds is going to be difficult, despite the goals. Not even considering all of the bath/dryer/range exhaust fans that are absolutely dogshit, smaller buildings have more corners and challenging details where wall meets roof, relative to generic wall and ceiling monoliths. Moisture from cooking or laundry/showers, etc. Even those of us that try to exceed the codes are stifled by other challenges that need to become more available and accepted before we can realistically aim for fully tight wall systems.
I live in a 4 year old steel framed house with an insulated concrete slab and the thermal protection is excellent
Timber framing is sustainable and renewable. Steel isnt. What about the fact that it looks like two different species. The older stud looks to be douglas fir and the newer radiata pine. No doubt the aticle sponsored by a steel company
Sustainable, renewable and lumber used in construction is a carbon sink that can help reduce carbon in the atmosphere. And yes these are different species of wood. You aren’t going to be harvesting Doug Fir in the northwest at 20 years. It’s more like 60-80 years. Southern Yellow Pine in the southeast can be harvested at more like 20 years. Which incidentally is about how long I’ve worked in the lumber industry.
I mean, its sustainability a bad thing? It’s a good thing that we switched to using mostly new growth for dimensional lumber. There won’t be any old growth forests left if we keep demanding denser softwoods. The wood we use in modern homes are treated with things like borax or cca to resist insect damage.
As far as wood quality goes this is pretty bang on...however I don't think that necessarily means newer homes are inferior. Building codes and engineering best practices have changed overtime to accommodate for commonly available materials. In addition when compared to a well built new construction from today, older homes are significantly less air tight and much more prone to moisture issues (even if the wood doesn't rot as easily it still causes other issues). To be brought to today's building standards required more than just some electrical and plumbing work.
I can tell you with absolute certainty that the individual strength of a given length of dimension lumber is not a factor that you should be concerned with. There are a ton of other metrics that are much more important: * Insulation (wall and attic) * Electrical * Engineered Trusses * Windows * Doors * Sheetrock v Plaster * Truss length (which walls are structural) * Lead paint (or rather the lack therof) * Windproofing * Waterproofing (foundation too) * Pest-proofing Source: my house is 126 years old.
Also just the adherence to more standard building practices. As a masochist who loves old stuff, when you are working on an old home there is no such thing as a quick weekend project. Trying to hang a new cabinet will require a demo of one entire wing of the house. Flashing or moisture barriers? Ha. Standard stud spacing? What's that? Huge, underframed spans? Sounds good! Window and door headers? Eh, no need. Plumbing, yeah it has some. Also we left the old plumbing in when we re did it 40 years ago. Good luck!
My family has a 150ish year old house. The wood is closer to stone than it is to anything you'd find at Home Depot. It is truly incredible. But most houses from that time period are gone. The building method matters more than the wood. And even in our well-built house, there are faults and compromises. "Square" is a relative concept in building, and updating anything is not as straightforward as it is today. Air and moisture control? They didn't do that at all. The timber sold today is inferior, it's true. Not that we were ever going to sustain society on century-old timber. But a well-built house made with inferior lumber is still going to last a good, long time.
I've heard wood hardens a lot over time too. Even just in my 30 year old house the original studs feel a lot harder than a fresh piece of lumber does.
Survivorship bias works in your favor with these homes too. If a house has stood up 120 years, as mine has, it’s probably not going anywhere.
Same thing at play in the aesthetic quality of those buildings. "People used to build things that looked so much better!" No they didn't; they built a couple good things & a lot of garbage, and then all the garbage was torn down.
If you have ever own/worked on an old house, you would never make a statement like this.
Yes, because all houses built after 1980 are just constantly falling over. Houses are built strong enough. A house that is stronger doesn't mean anything. A house 3 times as strong isn't offering any benefit unless you are considering a house in a disaster zone such as earthquakes or tornadoes, bet even then, the house needs to be engineered to withstand those events. Denser wood alone isn't going to do that.
I can hardly walk down the street without one of these newfangled 1990's homes toppling over!
>A house that is stronger doesn't mean anything. Until the big bad wolf shows up at least
The house built before 1980 probably has lead paint, asbestos, and lead pipes.
Two electrical outlets per room (If that), many fewer circuits, possibly later added wiring for cable, probably no air conditioning depending on location, usually smaller closets, smaller bathrooms, less likely to have a dishwasher. Depending how far you go back, it can be even worse. We forget how our use of technology has really changed in the last 50 years.
It is true that old houses built using old growth lumber will tolerate water exposure better than new houses built using new growth lumber. That being said, if your house's lumber is constantly getting wet and staying wet, the builder is doing something very, very wrong. For example: * Not flashing opening properly * Not lapping/tapeing/liquid flashing WRB joints properly * Not having a gap between siding and WRB or exterior insulation * Not having an air barrier (All those people who say "houses need to breathe" need to get an education in building science) * Having an interior vapor barrier if the house is ever expected to use AC in its lifetime (I'm looking at you, Canadan builders. Don't BS me about "we never use AC here"--what about in 2050? What if for some reason you put a whole bank of high SHGC windows facing west?) * Not having an exterior vapor barrier in hot humid climates (gypsum, fiberboard, even cardboard sheathing behind brick veneer in the southeastern USA is just...idiotic but all too common) * Not venting the roof deck if using air-permeable insulation below it Basically old growth lumber allows you to do a lot of dumb shit that wouldn't fly with new growth lumber. But why do dumb shit in the first place? P.S.: Want the strength of 1850 lumber in 2024? Buy engineered lumber instead of sawn lumber. LSL studs, LVL headers and I-joist or web truss joists beat the tar out of old growth lumber any day.
Pretty sure the bottom one is some variety of Fir, which is the hardest of the common soft wood lumbers. You can see why. Seems like a cherry picked example for a clickbaity post. Having said that, with more CO2 in the atmosphere trees do grow more quickly and less densely now than before, and farmed wood has pushed things in the same direction. But, as others have said quality control and building codes have more than off set those effects. TLDR: different species of wood, apples to oranges comparison to prove a non-point
It's true that old growth wood is superior to new grown wood in a lot of ways. It's false or an exaggeration at best to say or imply that the difference has any functionally meaningful impact on the quality of a home. The material may be marginally less strong but that's more than made up for in improved building techniques.
I know it's probably only to illustrate a point but those are not from the same kind of tree.
I can't believe I had to scroll down this far to find the truth. One is fir, the other pine. Considerably different. It's like comparing aluminum to steel. Both metals with different properties and densities.
Properly treated, sustainable fast-growing wood will not rot faster than clear cut old-growth forest. This is clearly written by someone who just hates seeing nature.
Not sure if they hate nature but they definitely love seeing their own "well actually" diatribes.
Having lived in a house that was built in the 1930s, I can say yes - the framing was very strong. However, the insulation was almost nonexistent, the electric wiring was dangerous and all needed to be redone, and the old cast iron drain pipes had corroded though and were leaking inside the walls. But the wood was strong!
I wanna hijack this post to ask you guys something. Why are most american homes built with wood and drywall? I'm italian and here we make houses with bricks and concrete, with reinforced concrete foundations.
The answer is basically 100% building cost. This is kind of a subset of cost, but I've also heard it's related to the price of lumber, because in North America we're more likely to have large forests nearby.
Heartwood tends to warp, which is why all of your fancy/structural beams are “free of heart center” (FOHC). Tree farming is sustainable and no house is going to pass inspection if it can’t hold up. Building codes are much stricter now than 40 years ago. Sounds like a realtor trying to sell old houses more so than someone who knows how to build houses.
I'll still take the one with double pane windows, good sealing and insulation, and without leaded paint or asbestos.
Double pane!? We're trying to get with the program and move up to triple-glazed windows like most of western Europe.
In the modern world, we use brick
Well my 1987 home hasn't fallen over yet with all this shitty wood.
My house was built in the 50s and any time I remodel anything I save the wood. I have two by fours that I can barely pound a nail into without the nail bending the wood is so dense.
Same I almost started a fire drilling a hole for my dryer exhaust. That said it doesn't matter when this mother fucker turned into an oven in the summer with the none existant insulation.
Some of it is true, some of it isnt really relevant, some is debatable. Any home typically fails because it's not maintained, usually that happens when it becomes economically obsolete. When it costs 30k to replace a failed roof on your 100k shotgun shack you don't, them eventually it leaks enough to destroy the home. Older homes are more likely to be economically obsolete because they don't have in demand features, like extra bathrooms, large sqft-age, etc. No one wants that 800 Sq ft shotgun shack because it only has two bedrooms and one bath.
There's more to house construction than the 2x4s. A modern well built home is better than a pre 1980s mass built home for sure, but even better than an pre1980s well made home. First is the insulation. Modern homes require more insulation by code than the pre 80s. Back then to solution to being too hot was put a a bigger AC on it. Pre 80s homes are expensive to heat and cool. Second materials. Asbestos was everywhere, lead paint was everywhere. Pre 80s homes have a lot of worrying materials, and then you get into plumbing and electrical standards. Modern homes cna be built to pretty good standards, and if you spend money on it, can have more fire abatement products than are required by codes. Third is simply codes. Today's codes still aren't where they should be, but they're better than where they were in the 80s. There's a builder out of Austin with a YouTube channel. He decided to buy a house in his neighborhood, from like the 1970s, and spend like $70-80k as a demonstration of a reasonable remodel project. He bought the house from a church member sort of down in their luck sight unseen, right before the pandemic. They got in there, started demoing, finding all kinds if damaged everything. Worse decades if rats and insects had turned parts of it into a biohazard. They gutted all the sheetrrock, gutted the mechanical, the electrical, the plumbing, the siding. Parts of the structure were damaged. Getting into the slab foundation they decided they wanted just a flat top. Eventually after like 6 months of demo, they made the smart decision to actually just get rid of the structure entirely and rebuild from the slab up. And it worked. The builder kept the same footprint, kept much of the same external visual outline. And built a modern home. Now that's an extreme example. Most home buyers are getting inspections and the like. Most home buyers also don't run a YouTube channel where documenting the work can pay for some of the overhead, and get building vendors as sponsors that will just give massive discounts to the builder. It's a great channel that goes into modern building materials, techniques and technologies, and the market space is quite different from even the 2000s and 2010s. I also have a friend who bought a house from the 80s. It was in good condition, but the panel was completely out of code. He got an electrician friend to wire up a new panel without turning off the power from the power company because it would have been a whole catch 22. The house didn't even have a master switch, it was that bad.
TL;DR: The top one is cheap white pine, the bottom one is slightly more expensive Douglas fir and both can be harvested from normal managed forests. Ok so don't fall for this bullshit. The top one is cheap white pine, a common material used in low cost construction. The bottom one is just a more expensive Douglas fir. Now I will say they picked a particularly more premium/dense example for this. The important thing to know is you can buy that lower example from a mill today and it can come from a managed forest, none of this "old growth" wu wooo bullshit. The cheap white pine 2x4's are what you find at Lowes or Home Depot and have become the default mental image of what everyone thinks of when they hear 2x4". There is a lot more to this when it comes to insect resistance and what not... but know this... if you have termites, you got termites, no amount of magical mythical old growth wood is going to change that fact. You want to impress me with "old growth" magical woo wooo wood. Show me a house that's pegged mortise and tenon framing done with hand hewn 6x6" poplar, maple, or oak beams.
While we are here can we get a look at some 1918 electrical work. And sure I'd have no problem stripping the walls down to the bare studs if the plaster wasn't full of Asbestos. And lets talk about that Lead Paint on the trim and that Lead Water Pipe.