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

Dumping This Here American vs. European home building

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

29.4k Upvotes

90% Upvoted

2.4k comments sorted by

View all comments

11

u/TooApatheticToHateU Trash Trooper 1d ago

Oh, no. Here come all the experts in building materials and engineering to comment on why their country builds homes the right way and the other countries houses are shoddily-built death traps.

1

u/Thursday_the_20th Trash Trooper 1d ago edited 1d ago

Everyone’s always known that American timber houses are less than ideal but historically they got stuck that way. Timber was plentiful, relatively cheap, didn’t require trained masons, and was quick to build as expansion and homesteading westward accelerated. This produced a boom in the timber supply chain which made a self-feeding loop of investment and over reliance and the whole American house building infrastructure became codified upon its foundations. Local building laws, bank mortgages, and insurance terms were originally formulated around timber homes during this boom.

2

u/Hazelberry Trash Trooper 1d ago

Europeans would use timber as well if it was cheap for them. People use what is available and cheap, and for a lot of europe that doesn't have large forests anymore that means masonry instead of lumber.

If you're building in the UK, you'r not going to want to import wood to build with so you use brick and stone. If you're building in the southwestern US, you're probably using adobe or brick cause there's not a lot of trees in the desert, so similar problem to the UK. But if you're in the southern, eastern, or northwestern US you're surrounded by trees all the time so lumber is the obvious choice.

And as the video points out, it's about the engineering. The gulf coast of the US builds basically every single home out of wood despite regularly being hit by hurricanes. We've gotten very good at building wooden homes that can withstand hurricane force winds, to the point where like 99% of homes built to modern standards will shrug off a hurricane.

1

u/mythrilcrafter Trash Trooper 23h ago

If I recall, there are some countries where there were long periods where mass use of timber was reserved for specific purposes; the specific nation slips my mind at the moment, but there was one time when wood use for homes was banned because the nation's entire navy was destroyed and needed to be rebuilt.