Every thread that's ever about US housing construction, some Europeans chime in ... (2024)

Perhaps I can correct some misconceptions. I know mostly about the UK rather than central Europe.

1) New houses in the UK are very well insulated indeed. Walls are commonly of cavity construction with 'lightweight' thermal blocks or timber on the inside skin, and insulation in the cavity. We also indsulate the floors and roofs. Our building code is pretty strict about insulation and I believe that is also true in Germany for instance.

2) We use brick on the outside because the UK climate makes external wood rot very quickly in normal circ*mstances. Cedar cladding can work if left to 'silver', but you have little chance of keeping paint on anything. Exterior woodwork also has to be treated with fire retardant if used as cladding. Roof coverings are normally clay tiles or slate.

There are buildings in my town that are 600+ years old, built out of oak framing with wattle and daub infills...but this is a very expensive way to build.

The notion that you cannot keep wood treatment on anything in the UK is ludicrous. You can choose to leave raw wood exposed, or you can chose to treat it every 5-10 years.

Source: my family in Norway owns several wooden houses that are a couple of hundred years old, and as a kid/teenager I spent a lot of time having to treat these houses :)

As an Icelander living in the UK, I will attest to this being true. It really surprised me that all my wooden outdoor structures and projects decay much, much faster in the UK than they did in Iceland, despite the general lack of frost. I hadn't considered it being due to added UV exposure. But I'm having to varnish my nice oak garage door every 18 months to keep it from going grey, despite using extra tough oil-based polyurethane. Similarly processed wooden structures would last many years in Iceland without any extra maintenance.

There's also the fact that when the ground is frozen, the microbes in the soil that cause rot and decay are less active. The constant dampness of UK soil means any wood that touches the ground is rotted through in a couple of years unless you take significant precautions, while in Iceland, the ground being frozen or dry a large part of the year makes this less of a problem.

Brick houses are terrible for insulation, terrible for running any new technologies like wiring or plumbing through, terrible for disasters like earthquakes.

I also live here in the PNW and I know what you mean by the ugly boxes, but that is what people want.

Speaking of both wooden siding and hariplank, construction is a big factor in the survivability of a home in the case of a wildfire.

Cedar shake looks very nice, but perhaps it is a bad idea when there is a non-zero chance of a neighbourhood fire blowing embers onto your roof. Here in western Canada, the Fire Smart guides are great. e.g., https://firesmartbc.ca/

Brick in Seattle is not great because we get earthquakes and brick tends to crumble.

There are some brick buildings, and there are some things you can do to reinforce them in preparation for an earthquake. But in general, wood is better.

54" vs 34". Florida has more volume of rain.

114 days vs 170 days. UK has more frequent rain.

Was just curious so looked it up and shared. Not drawing any conclusions. I actually find it hilarious that so many of the comments here are trying to distil such a complex and nuanced cultural difference down to stats and logic :)

36 percent of the US is covered by forest (1).38 percent of the EU is covered by forest. That's EU with Britain. Without Britain, the percentage is higher (2).

I realize I use different sources, and that maybe all forests are not equally good for lumber production. But Europe has as much forests as the US. Yes, a lot of it is concentrated in Scandinavia and Eastern Europe, so traditionally, that would have been less accessible to most central and western European countries. Also, traditionally, there was far more farm land. But nowadays, Europeans could access lumber as easily as Americans.

1:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forests_of_the_United_States#:....2:https://www.forestresearch.gov.uk/tools-and-resources/statis...

US: 818,814,000 acres (3,313,622 square kilometers).

EU: 161,000,000 ha

ha = ac / 2.4711

818,814,000 / 2.4711 = 331,356,076

Ok, the US has roughly double the forested surface area.

EU pop is 448m compared to US' 328m. So with 30% more population and half the forested surface area wood does seem scarser in the EU.

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.TOTL?locations=E...

Didn't check the numbers but I'd guess including European Russia or non-EU Balkans or Norway would totally change your results.

Then again, including Canada would probably as well.

"Tradition", I think, understates things a bit.

In any region, there are going to be specific factors of soil, climate, infrastructure, etc. that all affect how you would build homes. Transporting materials is expensive, so the availability of local materials is also a factor, though less of a factor than it used to be.

Builders and skilled tradesman in any region are going to have knowledge and practical experience with these local factors, and with the techniques and materials that address those factors. And to some degree, you're better off with the type of house that they're really good at building than the type of house that they're less experienced with.

If you're comparing the US and EU though, I think you also need to account for culture and language barriers. Construction techniques and materials across the US are more similar because builders and tradesmen from Oregon, Arizona, Texas, and Florida can all communicate more easily than builders and tradesman from across Europe.

> Europe has as much forests as the US. Yes, a lot of it is concentrated in Scandinavia and Eastern Europe...

I'm pretty sure Scandinavian houses do tend to use wood. Likewise, less forested parts of the US, like Arizona, tend to have fewer wooden houses.

There’s a definite trend of Europeans looking puzzlingly at things that Americans do differently and assuming it must be due to some combination of stupidity and greed.

I'm an American and I look at the things we do and they seem to be a combination of stupidity and greed.

You can look at strongtowns.org and many other places for a summary of the illogical, unsustainable and short-term-greed fueled quality of American urbanism.

> Not only is it less expensive to build, but it's tremendously more energy-efficient when filled with insulation

With modern buiding techniques - building an air tight home and then ventilating with mechanical ventilation, and taking into account thermal bridging - that's no longer true. If anything the extra thermal mass, compared to a wooden framed house, helps to keep it more comfortable and reduce energy consumption during day-night temperature swings. Some bricks, e.g. clay blocks with air pockets inside [0], are both structural and somewhat insulating - you could use them for something like a garage without any other insulation. If you are cheap you don't even need a facade :D

A lot of Central Europe has similar climates to NY - my area had -25C in the winter and 36C just this week. We usually don't even turn on the heating until it gets below 0C outside, as our home is more than comfortable enough (above 21C / 70F) inside until then.

Not gonna argue with the expensive part (there's a reason why people don't build 5000sqft homes here), however it is worth mentioning in most desirable places to build, it is often the land that is the most expensive part.

[0] https://www.wienerberger.com/en/brands-and-products/wall.htm...

The reason why us Europeans are so confused is, that over the last couple of years we started to see beyond the American Dream. And it feels like every time the US is having a problem it fails to find a solution for some country in Europe or Asia already has one. Not the perfect one, and maybe not one that can be copied, but one that works. Examples: Health care, elections, public transportation, guns, infrastructure, house construction...

Not that I would expect Americans to just copy what we do, but the outright refusal to acknowledge that someone else is doing things that seem impossible is at times hilarious.

All that with the obvious exception, everything military.

Edit: American houses are lower build quality because of lower build quality. Not because they are build out of wood. They are also considerably cheaper.

Likewise, some of us are a bit tired of the myopia coming from some Europeans. I’m writing this from an old brick home in the US, one of hundreds in my neighborhood. They’re not as old as the ones in your neighborhood since this area was only settled 150 years ago, but they’ll get there.

We’re not asking you to believe in some “American Dream,” just notice that we also have hundreds of millions of people who make highly varied decisions that conform to natural environments and resources, historical contexts, cultural preferences and financial limits.

The problem is that in the US, house structures are built as large and cheaply as possibly, with all the spending in finish and features.

The US is in the stone age when it comes to wall construction (for longevity and energy savings), vapor control, doors and windows.

I have a small project and I am having to order my windows, house wrap/wrb and tape from European suppliers.

Energy is comparatively cheap in the US. As an example, average natural gas prices for consumers have recently gone up to around 0.3€/m³ [0]. In one of the cheapest places in Europe, the Netherlands, itself a large natural gas supplier, it is about .79€/m³[1].

This does not encourage a culture of energy savings. Relevant experience just is not as deeply ingrained. Yet, if I may hope so.

Some examples, just concerning windows, unfortunately without references:

- One can still buy and legally install single pane windows in most of the US.

- A significant share of new windows in the US apparently still are double pane.

- New windows in the US are still often filled with air instead of specialised gases.

- Multi-chambered pvc windows are still being marketed as a tech innovation in some places in the US, while these are bog standard bottom line products even in the Baltic states.

- Try and ask your average window installer about air tightness seals and blower door tests.

[0] https://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/ng_pri_sum_a_EPG0_PRS_DMcf_m.htm

[1] https://www.milieucentraal.nl/energie-besparen/inzicht-in-je...

It (the reason) is not.

Most of NZ gets cold enough to need (at least) double paned windows, and all of NZ needs low-emissivity glass to reduce heat gain in summer. I believe the same is true of Australia.

NZ's current building standards are state of the art for the 1970s.

As gp said, specifying ordinary modern designs, materials and and fittings (by European standards) gets you looked at as though you're from outer space.

NZ's housing stock is cold, damp, and mouldy inside for the most part. Not coincidentally NZ has one of the highest rates of asthma in the world.

I went through a process of building an energy-efficient house, with double paned windows, thermo-resistant window frames, aerated concrete blocks, roof insulation and what not. This came at a significant surplus in my region, where 99% of the construction comes without it, and I got outer space looks all the time.

According to my calculations, the return on investment on reduced electricity costs will come in about 100-200 years, if not more.

In the meantime, if my house will end up in the market, it would hardly sell for any premium over any other house of similar footage in that area, so it's unlikely I would ever recover these costs.

First of all, that's generically false. Almost every new housing unit in this world should use triple glazing. It's just great insulation and it will reduce both heating and cooling bills and you know, climate change and all that jazz.

Secondly, NZ, OK, maybe it won't need even double glazing. But aren't AU summers super hot?

> Almost every new housing unit in this world should use triple glazing

I agree that it "should". The added costs don't justify it, that's why it usually doesn't. In my region, ROI on triple glazing is in hundreds of years.

I think modern American houses are lower quality and shorter lasting, but more because of sh*tty building techniques and poor finish materials than wood framing.

I worked in a wood barn in my youth that was built in 1680 in upstate NY, and will remain standing as long as the roof is maintained. My current home is a circa 1910 wood frame house that is in great shape and should be for years to come. There’s nothing wrong with wood.

I don't think it's fair to put brick and stone together like that. I personally live in France, where we have lots of old house made of stone, and they have a way better thermal insulation that houses made of brick, at least on my subjective "is it fresh in summer inside?" scale.

> Brick and stone homes are absolute energy guzzlers both in hot summers and cold winters.

That is not my experience, but a difference is maybe in how we heat things. This article about local heating explains my philosophy pretty well: https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2015/03/local-heating.html When it's cold, I tend to stay in the room where my computer is and wear a jacket. I do think that it's possible due to how Europe and especially France has a more temperate climate than the US though.

> wood construction has a ton of advantages. Not only is it less expensive to build

The comparaison doesn't really hold as in Europe it's easier to leverage old houses, due to the history of Europe. I don't think any new houses are made of stone.

It's really nice to have people like you point out misconceptions that Europeans can have, but please remember than you can have misconceptions too, and that Europe as a whole (like the US) is very large and has different climates. Not everything you said will hold in France, Spain, Ukraine, Greece, Norway.

This is the important part in my opiniom! And it's why Europe is warming up again to wood based construction (cross laminated timber from sustanaible forests).

All the other differences (ie isolation) can be achieved (or messed up) with either form of construction.

Most lumber used for houses is planted for that purpose. You have giant fields of 0-year-old trees, then a field of 1-year-old trees, so on up until the (chop down)-year-old-trees being harvested and the -1-year-old-trees being retilled and replanted.

Chopping down Brazilian rainforest for rare woods or cow grazing is environmentally unfriendly. Using commercial softwoods is supporting carbon sequestration and is probably more sustainable than most agriculture.

Does anyone know how sustainable lumber is now?

I hope empress trees become usable in construction, they grow insanely fast.

1) You can insulate stone houses as well

2) I spent a year working in D.C. and watched 4-5 houses come up in the neighborhood during that time. The amount of insulation used was _laughable_. Watching builders on YouTube I get the same impression. In Sweden 99% of houses are wood, but all have at the very least the double amount of insulation, often more.

Insulation does matter, but American insulation is also pretty strange- it is all rated by R value, which is only meaningful if you have a really good airtight seal. Any drafting ruins the insulative value very quickly.

Aerated concrete doesn't have that issue, because the concrete cells are closed and don't draft. If you end up with a poorly fitted window or 50+ mph winds, it doesn't let air through.

OTOH, totally agree about wood. Cheap(er), plentiful, and most importantly, everyone already knows how to work it and has the tools to do so.

Masonry work is physically harder, requires a sounder foundation that won't settle at all due to the increased weight, and there are fewer people willing to do the work. Getting anyone to do foam or aircrete is impossible- you have to watch a bunch of YouTube videos and DIY it yourself.

> Insulation does matter, but American insulation is also pretty strange- it is all rated by R value, which is only meaningful if you have a really good airtight seal.

You're not wrong, but IMHO the two should be handled separately. The fact that airtightness has been less stringent in the US is mostly an accident of history, which is being improved with recent building codes. It's just that in the past it was easy for people to simply buy some fluffy stuff and stuff it into the walls: doing blower door tests is a lot more complicated.

Building science has also progressed quite rapidly in the last 2-3 decades, and we now 'know better' in many areas than in the past.

> Aerated concrete doesn't have that issue, because the concrete cells are closed and don't draft. If you end up with a poorly fitted window or 50+ mph winds, it doesn't let air through.

First: what's the carbon footprint of concrete? What is footprint of wood framing?

Not letting air through (in or out) is actually what you want. The structures of buildings should not pass any air at all ideally, and all air exchanges should be done primarily via mechanical means:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIcrXut_EFA

I should edit that- I meant that even with a poorly fitted window or 50+ mile winds, the closed cell nature of the concrete doesn't let air circulate through it, while fiberglass does.

Such is, my point was that foam boards and concrete are compared to blown / rolled fiberglass, even though the fiberglass has more failure modes for insulating. A poorly fitted window will seriously compromise the R value of the surrounding fiberglass.

As for the carbon footprint of cement, solid is pretty high, foam not so much. I don't know about commercial stuff, but most DIY'ers seem to use a little under 100 lbs portland cement to make a 55 gallon barrel's worth once the foam is mixed in. Rough math puts a 55 gallon barrel of concrete at about 1000 pounds.

Edit: I just realized that 10% seems low, so what I saw may have used a 55 gallon barrel but not completely filled it. In any case, depending on the structural integrity that you need, the weight reduction (and therefore carbon footprint from curing) is significantly reduced.

We're living in an airtight, concrete, triple glazed house in europe with mechanical ventilation with heat exchange, plus heat pump on a ground source for heating amd (moderate) cooling. It's amazing, temperature is great 24/7 year round.

Having said that, your point about footprint holds and building with wood is coming 'back' here especially because of that, using cross laminated timber from sustainable forests.

> First: what's the carbon footprint of concrete? What is footprint of wood framing?

Carbon footprint of wood framing is terrible, because its mostly made of engineered wood with a lot of oil in it.

> mostly made of engineered wood with a lot of oil in it.

[citation needed]

Certainly LVL and LSL products are more processed, as is OSB, but those have the advantage of using 'off cuts' so they can use up some of raw materials that might otherwise be thrown out.

Even with all that processing I find it hard to believe that it would be worse than concrete, given the amount of (fossil fuel?) energy needed for cement kilns and other things.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_concre...

Insulation in the UK at least is also rated by R-value (or U-value, where U = 1/R). Can't speak to the rest of Europe.

Standard Assessment Producedure (which is used for household energy ratings) incorporates both this and some fudge factors for draftiness and local wind speed.

In the United States, masons and concrete (including aerated) are quite common; rarity doesn't factor into it. DIY is not necessary.

 You misunderstand building construction. American insulation is, indeed, rated by R value, its resistance to the conductive flow of heat. *Any* draft will bypass insulation of any material. A leaky window will leak air, regardless of the construction material of the wall. American wooden buildings are sealed with sheet plastic, Tyvek, etc. to prevent drafts; all part of the insulation.

Tyvek: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyvek

You are misunderstanding the American building system. We don't use fiberglass insulation by itself. You're picking a small part of a greater system and complaining it doesn't work in isolation. There are multiple layers to our construction and it's effective.

As for the wall material stopping drafts in a window frame, that makes no sense at all.

How does concrete stop a draft that is going between a window frame and the wall itself?

I've never had a draft through a fibercement/wood/fiberglass/drywall wall, in any case.

The same thing can happen when concrete cracks, which is quite common. All of this a question of basic building maintenance rather than the building materials chosen.

Cracking is why single family homes generally avoid concrete walls in the permafrost.

> Here's the thing, though: most Europeans seem to be suffering some pretty serious misconceptions.

Hi there, I'm a civil engineer from the EU who specialized in building structures and was trained in masonry and timber structures.

None of the concerns you mentioned feature as a design constraint. There is no shortage of building materials in Europe, and is indeed cheaper than the classical building materials. We do use a lot of concrete, masonry, and steel, none of which grows on trees.

The main factor is population density, and the ultimate and serviceability state that buildings need to comply with in order to be assuredly safe to be habitable by people.

It's fine if you wish to build a single-family home with a timber structure from top to bottom, provided that you do all the work to ensure that expected win loads are not able to blow out your home. There are homes being built like that around here. But those are indeed rare, because of cultural differences. The everyday joe around here looks at modern timber homes and, when compared with masonry, concrete, and even steel structures, immediately perceives it as low-quality work. Think McMansion. Prefabricated homes in general suffer from that prejudice, including light steel frame homes. That in turn leads to a market where most offerings target the low-end.

On higher density residential buildings things are quite different. most residential buildings have 4 or 5 stories and thus structural soundness starts to be harder to ensure. You no longer are able to meet safety requirements by having a low-skilled carpenter randomly nailing together two boards. Moreover, the loads are more demanding, both dead loads and live loads such as windHere the problem lies in the need to put together building structures that is verifiably safe involving cases where the minimum prescribed values in building standards don't cut it anymore. More importantly, you start to need to design specialized structural elements that can easily need to span over 6 meters. This is engineered timber territory, and one which can involve designing specialized structural elements. To add to the complexity, this technology introduces problems in complying with serviceability limit states that don't pose as big of a challenge with other technologies such as vibration limits and sagging.

Consequently, we do see engineered lumber structures in long span structures and even foot bridges, but in general it's more cost effective, simpler, durable, lower-mainrenance and higher-quality to just build with other building technologies.

Its not just the insulative value, stone and concrete also have thermal mass, which can keep you cooler in summer and warmer in winter. Some types of construction like rammed earth or hempcrete exploit this on purpose.

Wood frame houses don't have that.

Thermal mass is not always a good thing. High thermal mass is helpful in a temperate climates where winter nights are chilly and summer days are warm, but the average temperature all year is comfortable.

We don't have that in most of America. Having a high thermal mass in New England just means your heater has to work harder in the winter to heat your thermally massive house. Ditto for Arizona during most of the year.

Was typically cold at night. I’ve lived in southern Arizona since the 90s. 30 years ago it would feel cool driving home from the city. Now? Not at all.

Owning a concrete block house feels like all my money is going through the walls. Even if you have the AC on in the summer, you can touch the walls from the inside and they feel warm. I’m definitely going to need to look at insulation going forward.

In most masonry homes the insulation is on the inside of the masonry, so you don't get the masonry as part of the thermal mass inside the insulation envelope.

Wood framed houses can have thermal mass to keep a stable temperature. This is more common with homes with exposed wood framing, and SIP on the outside.

American houses aren't really built from "wood" as in directly from trees - they are build from "engineered wood" like fiberboard and particleboard.

That's a lot of industrial processing with a lot of oil-based glues and so on. By weight, the houses are almost more oil than wood.

Here's an enlightening chapter of "Well there's your problem" podcast about this with actual civil engineers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVodkE47aLw

By "brick" and "stone" you don't mean literally bricks and stones, right? Because modern houses are constructed with cinder blocks[0], foam concrete[1], polystyrene concrete[2] and composite blocks. And using mineral wool as an insulation is, well, not the best idea construction engineering came to in last 50 years.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concrete_masonry_unit

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foam_concrete

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expanded_polystyrene_concrete

there's plenty of new builds in the UK using mostly red brick construction methods. Just plain old brick and mortar.

In fact, if you google "uk new builds" almost every image that comes up is a red brick house.

> I don't know how they're joined--bolted? Riveted?

For black metal, it's the most obvious method — welding.

For sheet metal, it's clinching, snaps, or, more rarely, threaded fasteners.

Unfortunately, while it’s definitely possible to insulate wood houses, it’s often not done [1]. As a result, more than half of energy use at home is spent on temperature control [2]. Yes, European homes are also underinsulated, but bricks provide better insulation per default.

I agree about European deforestation. Wood from the Russian Taiga and the Amazon are illegally imported as a result, that’s so embarrassing and wrong.

I did list specially treated wood in the list of building materials btw, you might have overlooked that. I agree that wood can be a great material for building modern houses, when combined with other materials. Homes purely made of wood would be too unsafe for me personally (fire hazard, termites in the US, high susceptibility to outside forces).

1: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ninety-percent-of-u...

2: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/use-of-energy/homes.php

> Unfortunately, while it’s definitely possible to insulate wood houses, it’s often not done [1].

"Ninety Percent of U.S. Homes Are Under Insulated"

Yes, because Ninety Percent of U.S. Homes Were Built With Old(er) Building Codes.

> Yes, European homes are also underinsulated, but bricks provide better insulation per default.

A lot of Europe is a lot more temperate than the US and Canada, so it didn't make much of a difference. I'm in Toronto, Canada, and we regularly get -15C winter weather as well as >30C (>80% RH) summer days too. To stay comfortable you really need heating and cooling. Many buildings in the EU don't have cooling (which has caused all sorts of problems during heat waves).

The US has eight climate zones (AK not shown):

* https://www.ecohome.net/guides/3521/climate-zones-map-usa-ca...

And while a lot of the construction techniques would be the same regardless of location (e.g., air tightness), other things would not (insulation, HVAC equipment).

> Yes, because Ninety Percent of U.S. Homes Were Built With Old(er) Building Codes.

Most public housing projects in Vienna, Austria, were retrofitted with modern insulation in the timespan of 10-20 years ago. Public funding exists in various EU countries for home owners to do the same.

> A lot of Europe is a lot more temperate than the US and Canada, so it didn't make much of a difference.

The number of households in Sweden, Finland, and Norway combined is comparable to Canada. Temps seem to be similar there.In Austria we get -10 and sometimes -15 degrees Celcius in winter, and up to 35 degrees in summer. Same in Germany, where 18% of EU inhabitants live. Bricks are a staple in energy conservation in big parts of Europe.

Maybe someone with more local knowledge can correct me, but I am under the impression that most homes in Sweden, Finland, and Norway are made out of wood.

They, like Canada, have a convenient source of wood in the boreal forests.

Single family houses are typically wood framed, yes. Exterior differs, wood planking and brick are probably the most common.

Multi-story buildings in cities are typically prefabricated concrete modules, sometimes clad in brick, sometimes just painted.

At least in Florida, modern building codes of the past couple decades requires excellent insulation. The reason for so many houses being under-insulated (a separate issue from uninsulated) is because most houses are older. For the very reason you started with, houses last for many decades.

It also matters how one determines under-insulated. Energy here is cheap; we use big trucks as commuter cars. Using half our electricity for heating and cooling didn't matter until CO² usage became important; now it's huge.

> it’s often not done

Sure, 50 years ago. Modern code calls for a lot of insulation.

There are very good prefab houses made of wood in Europe. A relative of mine paid 600K EUR for one.

Also, while there is more wood in North America, it’s not like there are no forests in Europe. Take a look at Romania or Bosnia if you want to see big wild ones.

There are dozens of articles about it. This is the first result with duckduckgo for "wood prices soar": https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2021-05-12/lumber-pri...

can't tell u how many times I asked American construction workers/contractors about this, and none knew the answer. Glad to finally have an answer. thx.

Site note: can't stand the amount of noise(!) going throw the house as opposed to concrete.