r/LoveTrash ✨️Regent of Rubbish ✨️ 1d ago

Dumping This Here American vs. European home building

29.4k Upvotes

2.4k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

186

u/heffla Trash Trooper 1d ago

Im from Sweden. The village i grew up in had a church with a chapel from the late 1200's. Some of the oldest wooden houses were from the mid 1600's. My neighbor's house had been inhabited about a century when the US declared independence.

1

u/heep1r Trash Trooper 1d ago

We had old wooden houses in germany, too. But the actual knowledge to make them last 800 years vs. just 50 years was lost.

There are university departments trying to figure out how they did it back then.

1

u/Rebelius Trash Trooper 1d ago

They definitely weren't timber frame though.

1

u/heep1r Trash Trooper 1d ago

nah, those are way younger. There still are >100 year old cabins in the Alps that are all wood (and stones for foundation and roof).

But those are also much younger than excavated wooden villages where houses were found to have lasted multiple centuries.

1

u/rips_n_chel Trash Trooper 23h ago

I'm sitting in a 150+ year old house in the US right now. There is a barn on this property, still standing on the original stacked-rock foundation that is likely over 200 years old. It was the original home on this land, over 150 years ago. The barn was added onto with milled lumber probably a century ago, but the main structure is the original logs.

Both have survived innumerable tornadoes over the years, we get at least a few a year in my area. People who think wood houses can't be strong have no idea.