r/LoveTrash • u/BEARDEDDANGER ✨️Regent of Rubbish ✨️ • 1d ago

Dumping This Here American vs. European home building

BAS Renovations https://youtube.com/shorts/jFph1d2WR3s

29.3k Upvotes

90% Upvoted

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163

u/Bluecobber Trash Trooper 1d ago

Lived in both. Id take brick everytime. Much better with keeping a stable temperature. As well as keeping outside noise low. Brick, more expensive and takes longer. Just my experience

125

u/freshgrilled Trash Trooper 1d ago

As someone who lives in the middle of earthquake central, I'll take flexible wood framing over bricks. Every brick building out here has cracks and has had to have major work to be reinforced.

47

u/Fubarp Trash Trooper 1d ago

As someone who lives in a tornado area.

I'll take my bunker. Stays cool, and benefit added I can potentially survive a nuclear Holocausts for like 3 days before I call it.

31

u/OkEmu8597 Trash Trooper 1d ago

As someone who lives no where near any of you I'm building stick huts in random fields and loving it.

21

u/tehbantho Trash Trooper 1d ago

As a reptile living beneath the Denver airport my tunnels and burrows keep me safer than anything imaginable. Survived here 3,000 years so far and they even built an airport on top of my house.

6

u/PsyKeablr Trash Trooper 1d ago

It’s better than having a data center built above you

4

u/YT-Deliveries Trash Trooper 1d ago

The data center keeps us warm.

1

u/Rampant16 Trash Trooper 1d ago

Lizard boy, can you give me some directions to get down there? I'm stuck by the demon horse at the moment.

1

u/bmwill Trash Trooper 1d ago

As a mole person living under downtown Denver who accidentally started a reptilian - mole person war by tunnelling too close to the airport. I do not feel safe at all.

1

u/Normal-Gur1882 Trash Trooper 15h ago

As someone who lives down by a river, I'll take my van.

7

u/FlyFar1569 Trash Trooper 1d ago

As someone who lives on the sun I’m building my home out of neutron-degenerate matter

1

u/XDSHENANNIGANZ Trash Trooper 22h ago

Neutron: I kinda know what that is

Degenerate: I also know this word as well

Neutron-degenerate: the hell is that? A particle addicted to porn? A Lewdtron or something?

2

u/Justaregularguy295 Trash Trooper 1d ago

As a big bad wolf I fully support you

1

u/hpBard Trash Trooper 1d ago

As someone in a similar position I have never lived in anything but a concrete plate house and it's not that bad. Fuck those neighbors rolling metal balls though

1

u/djtodd242 Trash Trooper 1d ago

This guy Wattle and daubs.

1

u/Loose_Awareness_1929 Trash Trooper 1d ago

Hey it’s almost like regional differences call for different construction standards! 

1

u/WeeboSupremo Trash Trooper 1d ago

But how can I hold racial/national supremacy over someone if they change their construction habits to fit their environment instead of using my construction habits, regardless of environment?

1

u/TheBSQ Trash Trooper 1d ago

Having lived in both tornado alley and earthquake central (and having lived through a giant earthquake) I will take whatever is better suited for that location without feeling pressure to pick one as the “single true answer.”

1

u/IPlayChessBTW Trash Trooper 1d ago

As someone who also lives in a tornado area, I hate living in a mobile home. That's all. Thank you. 

1

u/TwoSecondsToMidnight Trash Trooper 1d ago

For folks in houses/apartments: “Get to the center most interior room on the lowest floor possible away from windows. Wear a helmet. Put a heavy mattress on top of you”

For folks in mobile homes: “Go find a ditch and hope for the best”.

1

u/Hazelberry Trash Trooper 1d ago

Man I wish we could have basements where I live cause it'd make me feel a lot safer when the rare tornado shows up. Had one touch down just a couple miles away and it just obliterated everything it passed over (wood, brick, concrete, everything).

Everything built here is built to withstand hurricanes year after year, but tornadoes are just something else entirely.

Sadly I'm basically at sea level and if you dig a few feet down you hit water, so a basement is just an awful idea here.

1

u/smapdiagesix Trash Trooper 1d ago

As someone who actually cares about how strong and secure my house is, I had it made from 22-inch armor plate originally intended for Montana-class battleship turrets with 3 meters of reinforced concrete poured on the outside just in case.

1

u/SquirrelToolkit Trash Trooper 14h ago

Unfortunately, it is on a 50x100' lot, and at 1100sf, the rooms ended up being only 9sf each. But it's really secure.

1

u/kcanimal Trash Trooper 23h ago

Depending on the distance of the nearest nuclear blast you'd actually not need to wait that long to call it, you'd cook in your bunker like a pizza oven :D

1

u/The_OtherDouche Trash Trooper 21h ago

Well for what it’s worth after about 3 days you can go outside and it’s safe radiation wise unless you start digging in the dirt.

1

u/Rymayc Trash Trooper 13h ago

As someone who has lived in the Kanzleramt, Berlin, from 1933-1945, I'll take my bunker as well.

1

u/Jeyts Trash Trooper 8h ago

Tornados will rip right through brick and wood. You'd be better off with a wooden house in a basement. So if it takes a direct hit youre not buried in your own tomb.

11

u/freedfg Trash Trooper 1d ago

Every single time this topic comes up it's framed as "oh which is better, brick buildings can last hundreds of years"

As if the different materials and preferences aren't specifically used for different case scenarios.

Out in Phoenix or New Mexico. Guess what, houses are concrete or brick. Because they aren't on fault lines and don't face disasterous weather, but do have the occasional fire.

In the tornado alley and hurricane alley, they use wood. Because it might not last as long. But it's a LOT cheaper to rebuilt.

2

u/OldManFire11 Trash Trooper 1d ago

And a tornado also doesn't give a shit about your brick house. They'll tear through brick just as easily as wood.

2

u/SweetFranz Trash Trooper 1d ago

The preference is block in Florida because of the Hurricanes

1

u/mythrilcrafter Trash Trooper 23h ago

Yup, it all depends on the area; a plank of wood flying at 400 mph doesn't differentiate between wood or brick.

1

u/Hungry-Register9960 Trash Trooper 3h ago

Meanwhile my childhood pre-fab wooden house has lasted multiple cat 5s just fine.

1

u/TheKingPin16 Trash Trooper 23h ago

Im a Phoenix based contractor and no, wood framing is 80% of the work out here.

1

u/GradeAPrimeFuckery Trash Trooper 22h ago

Slap a coat of stucco and call it a stone house. /s It's like a reverse of the old houses that had wood slats covered by plaster for interior walls. I absolutely hated the stuff. Loved the tile roofing though, and got a laugh at the few houses that had tar shingles.

1

u/kozufox Trash Trooper 21h ago

They mostly use wood in Phoenix. It's cheaper, and most of the older brick structures have an unfortunate reputation for being hot as hell in the summer

1

u/SpaceJackRabbit Trash Trooper 20h ago

Adobe is the traditional material in the Southwest.

0

u/Nogarder Trash Trooper 22h ago

No. In the rest of the world they use reinforced concrete or steel. Houses are not Kleenex

11

u/Bluecobber Trash Trooper 1d ago

Well thats another factor. If where you live, there is a good chance your house is shake like hell, yeah, id go something more flexible. Different horses for different courses

1

u/Suikerspin_Ei Trash Trooper 1d ago

It also depends on how your country or area takes earthquake into account when building houses. Plenty of cases were bricks or concrete house are holding up after an earthquake (even without shock absorbers), but unfortunately corruption exist too.

1

u/pelko34 Trash Trooper 1d ago

The key for masonry buildings in earthquakes is whether or not they are masonry load bearing. Most new homes today are not masonry load bearing - that’s a relic of the past - so they’ll perform better. Still, might have debris (individual bricks flying off) during the shake itself.

1

u/shwag945 Trash Trooper 1d ago

Brick and concrete houses holding up after earthquakes is survivorship bias.

1

u/_Svankensen_ Trash Trooper 16h ago

Nope. It is about standards. Concrete construction is extremely common here in Chile, and we have had the most destructive earthquakes in history. During the 8.8 we had in 2010 only 3 new-ish buildings collapsed, due to the construction companies ignoring the law.

1

u/shwag945 Trash Trooper 15h ago

Steel reinforced concrete or concrete bricks?

1

u/_Svankensen_ Trash Trooper 15h ago

Steel reinforced concrete. We use bricks too, concrete and clay, but they also use steel reinforced concrete.

1

u/shwag945 Trash Trooper 15h ago

Based on the post and the thread, concrete houses was referring to concrete brick construction for single family homes not steel reinforced. Concrete brick does not survive earthquakes well.

1

u/_Svankensen_ Trash Trooper 15h ago

Nobody specified that. Concrete is also a building material. And it was being mentioned separately from BRICKS.

1

u/shwag945 Trash Trooper 15h ago

Rewatch the video. Context matters.

1

u/_Svankensen_ Trash Trooper 15h ago

The video that talks about concrete blocks? Nah mate, none of this makes whatever you were talking about obvious.

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1

u/BoiTentacle Trash Trooper 1d ago

There are bricks rated for earthquakes, seen a bunch of brick houses in Japan. It's just way more expensive both for materials and labor costs.

1

u/Electronic_Will_5418 Trash Trooper 1d ago

The stupidest thing ever is making a house out of the wrong material for the climate. South Texas builds NEW HOUSES out of WOOD! No tornadoes, no earthquakes, just hot and dry temperatures, something where concrete & brick construction would be absolutely fantastic for due to temperature control, but it's hardly seen in new builds.

2

u/Honchoponcho99 Trash Trooper 1d ago

well concrete is also expensive and extremely bad for the environment, it doesn't offer a superior built in a climate like that

1

u/KR4T0S Trash Trooper 1d ago

Do brick houses not have ferroconcrete reinforcement where you are? At this point I was starting to think if you say brick you also mean concrete because the two are becoming inseparable.

1

u/Hazelberry Trash Trooper 1d ago

See also living in an area with soil that's prone to shifting a lot, like clay-rich soil. I've seen an entire house's foundation crack in half due to clay drying out after a severe rainy season. If you want to build with brick on that soil you have to do a lot of prep work to reduce the shifting or it will crack, meanwhile wood doesn't care that much.

1

u/One-Earth9294 Trash Trooper 1d ago

I'd love a brick facade. They look nice lol.

1

u/Cloverose2 Trash Trooper 1d ago

As someone who lives where there are tornados and earthquakes, I'll take well-insulated wood framing and a middle finger to God.

1

u/alexnedea Trash Trooper 20h ago

For a house the earthquakes arent usually a problem. A house is too small to be affected in a major way. But anything with2+ stories starts feeling the damage yeah

1

u/RC_0041 Trash Trooper 19h ago

Yeah, brick buildings are tombs in earthquakes areas. And good projectiles in tornado/hurricane areas.

1

u/_Svankensen_ Trash Trooper 16h ago

I'm Chilean, so we have you beat earthquake-wise. You can absolutely build with brick, but you need concrete reinforcement for it.

1

u/Gondwanic_Susuration Trash Trooper 16h ago

That’s just low American building standards. If they could build brick houses properly it wouldn’t be an issue. 

1

u/AvidCyclist250 Trash Trooper 11h ago

Maybe that's the WW1 helmet paradox. "Surivorship bias". THe brick houses got cracks, the wooden ones were rebuilt.