[HN Gopher] So you want to build a house more efficiently
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So you want to build a house more efficiently
Author : srl
Score : 188 points
Date : 2021-06-26 18:12 UTC (4 hours ago)
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| swiley wrote:
| The most efficient way to build houses is in bulk by building
| large buildings with condos/apartments, no one seems to want to
| hear or accept that though.
| ctdonath wrote:
| USA population density is 6.6 acres per person, or 37 people
| per square kilometer. I'd far rather my family be in a more
| expensive larger home on 25 acres (with prospect of self-
| sufficiency) than jammed into a large building with X # of
| strangers and no land.
|
| Funny thing is, that "more expensive larger home" isn't more
| expensive - it's on par or cheaper, even with the land. Blows
| my mind that urban dwellers think paying equivalent of my
| mortgage (on a 2400sqft house) for a couple rooms is
| reasonable.
|
| Building big may be more efficient, but that's not what
| occupants see in their rent bill.
| xnx wrote:
| Or as large subdivisions built all at once, like Levittown
| mentioned in the article.
| bradleyjg wrote:
| Californians would rather preen about with paper straws and
| compost bins and then drive their telsas back to single family
| homes with lawns.
|
| Meanwhile New Yorkers are taking the subway to their apartment
| homes.
|
| Different cultures.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Everyone knows and accepts that. They just don't really want
| those houses.
| occz wrote:
| I very much doubt that to be true. As far as I've understood
| it, a far too large amount of land in the U.S is zoned to be
| single-family housing, effectively preventing this type of
| home to be built. That precludes any choice in the matter.
| People in the U.S opt for single-family homes because they
| are really the only available option.
| ghaff wrote:
| There are a ton of apartments/condos in the the US. They're
| just expensive in the most in-demand areas.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Which, compared to their European counterparts, are
| flimsy, lacking acoustic insulation and a certain je ne
| sais quois. I've lived in both, and while I'd never want
| to move into most US apts/condos, I'd happily live in
| many European ones, even those built after 1970
| (arbitrary number).
| dctoedt wrote:
| FTA: "Flexible technologies that work within the current system
| and simplify processes have had the most success. These
| technologies allow the high precision and efficiency of factories
| to make it to the building site. [Example:] Experienced
| carpenters use chisels to create post and beam members on site.
| -> 2x4s and nails are mass manufactured and assembled by semi-
| skilled workers on site."
| elihu wrote:
| If fancy manufacturing facilities with expensive equipment don't
| scale well because construction materials are manufactured in a
| lot of small factories rather than a few big ones, it seems like
| an obvious way to improve construction is to reduce the cost of
| that fancy equipment so that it's available even to small
| operations.
|
| We see this with a lot of smaller-scale tools: 3D printers, CNCs,
| laser cutters, welders, pick-and-place machines for assembling
| circuit boards, etc.. are things that have become affordable to
| casual hobbyists.
|
| I could see augmented reality being a big deal for construction.
| See exactly where everything is supposed to go as you install it.
|
| Maybe eventually a mobile 3D-printing gantry that can be quickly
| deployed on site will be something that a small local business
| would own.
| WalterBright wrote:
| One thing I notice is the large volume of waste from stick
| framing on site. A huge pile of cut lumber that just goes to the
| dump.
| creato wrote:
| I haven't seen this at the job sites I've been on. Most of the
| wasted wood is a small pile of cuttings from the oddly sized
| parts of the build, but it's surely less than 5% of the whole
| build, probably even less than 1%. Any scraps more than a foot
| long will usually get used for something.
|
| The incentives are aligned here, contractors don't want to buy
| more wood than necessary.
| kingsuper20 wrote:
| Exactly.
|
| It isn't like walls are 8'2" high. There's a great deal of
| standardization built into modern home design.
| ohyeshedid wrote:
| I've seen large houses framed out and the scrap loss didn't
| fill a trashcan. Running jokes about the tags weighing more
| than the actual wood scrap.
| Syonyk wrote:
| If you ever get a chance to tour a manufactured home facility,
| one of the big things you'll notice is that there is almost no
| waste coming out the back end, and certainly far, far less
| waste than you see in a typical site-built home (huge dumpsters
| of waste being hauled off regularly).
|
| They're designed so that there's just not much in the way of
| waste - because dimensions are standard, and consistency is
| pretty good, you simply make sure that if you have a cut of a
| standard piece, you need the other half of it over there.
| There's just very, very little waste.
|
| On top of that, there's very little transporting of random
| stuff, because it's all built onsite. Cabinets are built as an
| entire unit in a quarter of the factory I toured, and are
| simply run across into the house before the roof goes on.
| There's no need to make sure the cabinets fit through doors and
| such - the entire assemblies are brought in and dropped in
| place (or nearly so) through the top.
|
| The roof, meanwhile, is built at more or less waist height
| (depending on slopes). It's assembled, "drywall up," on some
| jigs that hold it properly, wiring is run, the joists are
| added, and you end up with a roof segment that is then lifted
| up, painted, and set down on top of the house. It almost
| entirely eliminates the "roof work" risk for doing roofs.
|
| I know in most modern tech circles it's incredibly popular to
| hate "trailer homes" - which tells me that most people's vision
| of them is a 1970s single wide, 50 years of limited maintenance
| later. Modern manufactured homes have nearly nothing to do with
| that - ours is 2x6 exterior construction, drywall, Energy Star
| rated, metal roof, good insulated windows, etc. Out of
| curiosity I signed up for the power company's free "energy
| analysis" thing, where they come and check the ducts, do a
| blower door test, etc, and they left saying "There's literally
| nothing we can improve - this is a tight house, comfortably in
| the top range, and your ducts are very well sealed too." I'd
| wager my results against any similar size site built home in
| the area.
|
| People we have over are consistently surprised to find out that
| our place is a manufactured, because it doesn't match the
| "trailer house" image. I think it's blindingly obvious it's
| manufactured, but I also saw it come in on trucks, and I know
| the signs to look for - simple rectangular floor plan, a strong
| marriage line down the center, and typically water only on one
| half of the house (it avoids having to do any water pipe joins
| onsite, which reduces the risk of leaks). We have a concrete
| foundation under the house, and it works great for us.
|
| But, you know, we do legally live in a "trailer home." Doesn't
| bother us in the slightest.
| maxsilver wrote:
| > It's incredibly popular to hate "trailer homes" - which
| tells me that most people's vision of them is a 1970s single
| wide, 50 years of limited maintenance later. Modern
| manufactured homes have nearly nothing to do with that
|
| How do you actually find these? How can you tell the
| difference?
|
| Every 1970's-era trailer house manufacturer has rebranded
| themselves as "Modular, not Mobile". For non-experts, it's
| hard to tell the difference, which might be why everyone
| lumps them all together.
|
| I would love to buy a well-designed actually-good factory-
| standardized home. Every thing I've seen that _claims_ such,
| is just a rebranded trailer house.
| Syonyk wrote:
| In the 80s, the standards changed so you can't have the old
| newspaper and spit style manufactured homes anymore.
|
| But I'm not sure what exactly you're looking for. Our house
| is absolutely a "trailer" - it came in two pieces, has long
| I-beams under the floor, and still has axles down in the
| crawlspace. I believe one can get the "modular" version
| which is the same thing, same factory, and doesn't keep the
| axles (with perhaps a few other changes - it didn't matter
| to me and was more money for the same end result).
|
| Despite that, it's a solid drywall based house, 2x6
| exterior walls, etc.
|
| But if you want more details, you'll have to find someone
| in your area who sells them and go find out more - my
| regional knowledge probably isn't applicable to your
| situation.
| dangrossman wrote:
| > Every 1970's-era trailer house manufacturer has rebranded
| themselves as "Modular, not Mobile".
|
| This isn't just branding. The Housing Act of 1980 required
| the term "manufactured" be used in place of "mobile" in all
| federal laws about homes built after 1976.
|
| If you look at a "mobile" home, it's one built before
| modern standards, where if you look at a "manufactured" or
| "modular" home, it's one that conforms to the National
| Mobile Home Construction and Safety Act (1974) and HUD
| Manufactured Home Construction and Safety Standards (1976).
|
| Now "manufactured" vs "modular" is whether it's built just
| to the federal HUD standards, or also built to the same
| local codes as a site-built home.
|
| All three (mobile, manufactured, modular) are terms for
| factory-built pre-fab homes, i.e. "trailer homes".
| lostapathy wrote:
| > because dimensions are standard, and consistency is pretty
| good, you simply make sure that if you have a cut of a
| standard piece, you need the other half of it over there.
| There's just very, very little waste.
|
| They also operate at a scale such that if they need an
| oddball length of some material, the lumber mill is happy to
| supply it cut to that oddball length since they are buying it
| by the railcar.
| lazypenguin wrote:
| The amount of waste in general for constructing or remodeling a
| house is incredible. In my experience, even if you wanted to be
| conscientious about the waste (e.g repurpose timber), it would
| require so much more effort that's already going into the
| project that it's just easier to throw all the waste together
| in one bin and take to the landfill.
| alkonaut wrote:
| It's indeed much easier to reduce waste in a factory when the
| production line can optimize for reducing waste.
|
| It's a delicate problem though. I have recently implemented
| such an optimization for wall panel production lines and it's
| not so easy for the operators cutting sheets of material to
| keep too many leftover bits for the following wall panel being
| built, and the order of the panels built can be dictated by a
| specific loading order on the delivery truck so can't be
| reordered to reduce waste.
|
| Working on various bin-packing and cutting stock problems is an
| interesting challenge!
| ohyeshedid wrote:
| That largely depends on the builders, and in particular the
| project managers.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| I think the solution to reduce housing costs is simple and three-
| fold.
|
| First: most people can build a house. It's _really_ not
| difficult. Today 's homes are quite complex in terms of their
| layers of parts, and constantly varying building codes don't
| help. But if you can swing a hammer and push a saw, you can build
| a house.
|
| Ikea has shown it's not only possible, but profitable, to sell
| virtually everything that goes in a home to consumers and have
| them put it together themselves. So why not the rest of the house
| too? We've done it before: Sears shipped people houses on the
| railroad along with instructions and (eventually) pre-fab parts.
| They sold them for 30 years.
| https://www.amusingplanet.com/2021/06/sears-mail-order-homes...
|
| A huge chunk of the cost of a home is the labor. So let the
| homeowner handle more of it! They can build in stages, offsetting
| costs and building at their own pace. And if somebody gets tired
| of doing it themselves, they can always hire a contractor.
|
| Second: customers interest in having a unique home is a huge
| cost. So let's focus on building either the variable parts, or on
| making a "core home" that can be customized after the fact by
| customers. Most homes are just boxes. It should be possible for
| us to construct some basic designs that can then be modified or
| "spruced up" by the homeowner later. Most of the features that
| make a home look unique could be turned into add-ons, so that we
| could focus on efficiency of the bare home, and let customers
| take on additional cost when and if they choose.
|
| Third: most people don't need huge houses! Due to the increasing
| cost of renting, most renters rent apartments that are absolutely
| tiny by comparison to the average new home. We can reduce housing
| costs further by simply making the building smaller, and gaining
| efficiencies by taking advantage of that smaller size. Want a
| bigger home? By having simpler designs by default with add-on
| exteriors, we can make it much easier to add extensions on to
| houses. Simply unbolt the exterior facade, build on your
| extension, and bolt the facades back on. This allows us to spend
| less money on materials and labor, while still allowing the
| consumer to add to the property over time.
| greedo wrote:
| I think it's a bit reductive to say that if you can push a saw
| and swing a hammer that you can build a house. Sure in theory,
| but the idea runs into a lot of problems quickly.
|
| 1. Navigating the permitting process 2. Finding a lender
| willing to finance a self-built home. 3. Learning the
| complicated trades (plumbing/electrical/foundation) 4.
| Affording to take the time to build a house.
|
| Just #4 alone makes this a non-starter for most people. The
| average home takes between 6-9 months to build, and that's with
| an experienced crew. Learning as you go would easily add 6
| months to this. Affording to take a year off to build is just
| not something "most people" can do.
|
| I have a neighbor who is a building contractor. He built his
| house on his weekends, doing the majority of the work himself.
| It took him over a year, and he has the skills, tools, and
| knowledge. Joe Six Pack isn't going to know enough to avoid the
| pitfalls that can make this a disaster.
| csours wrote:
| If there was a way to never have electric cables or plumbing in
| walls, that would speed up construction and reduce the cost.
|
| The savings for this don't just show up in the plumbing and
| electrical categories, but also in framing and finishing, as well
| as hidden inefficiencies - you have to pre-wire and plumb, and
| then late come back to finish wiring and plumbing.
|
| Also, this article is about how to construct a house in an
| efficient manner, not how to construct a house that is efficient
| throughout it's life.
| walrus01 wrote:
| Ctrl-f "SEER"
|
| No results found
|
| Since nobody has mentioned it yet, I recommend doing some
| dedicated research into the efficiency level and measurements of
| various types of air conditioners, mini split and otherwise.
| There is a great deal of variation.
| mortenjorck wrote:
| It was interesting to see architecture and engineering broken out
| as ~1.5% of the total cost of building a home, and it made me
| wonder: How much does better residential architecture actually
| cost?
|
| If I were in the market to build a home, and the difference
| between building something that looks like your average suburban
| detached versus something modern and striking were, say, an extra
| 1.5% (doubling the cost of architecture and engineering), I
| wouldn't even consider skimping on architecture.
|
| And yet, most architecturally-interesting homes are most
| certainly not 1.5% or even 15% more than average-looking homes,
| being generally restricted to luxury markets. Why is that?
| ghaff wrote:
| Probably because the architecture and engineering is only a
| small part of the cost, the things the architects design in are
| _much_ more expensive to build.
|
| The actual design of the striking granite-block construction
| with large windows on the coast may not cost all that much. But
| the materials and skilled artisans sure do.
| manmal wrote:
| The concepts in the article sound foreign to me - they are, since
| I live in the EU. In Central European countries, most houses are
| built to last 80-150+ years. People like to use bricks, aerated
| concrete or specially treated wood that will last for a very long
| time. There are other systems too, like walls filled with small
| clay pellets mixed with concrete. Houses built in such a way are
| quite expensive, usually EUR300k or more for a typical family
| home where I live. That leaves some room for prefab
| (Fertigteilhaus) to be cheaper, contrary to what OP wrote.
|
| There are small model cities you can visit where several dozen
| prefabbers exhibit their current model homes, and if you stick to
| their plan, you will usually pay less than building on your own.
| Those are often built on wood frames, but are still quite sturdy
| and supposed to last at least 100 years. Others are built with
| bricks or aerated concrete just like individually built homes.
| Savings are probably achieved by bulk orders, prefab, and a well
| coordinated team who has built the exact same house ten times
| already.
| ajuc wrote:
| Yup, American building culture is so weird.
| fpoling wrote:
| In US in many areas the earthquakes safety requires to build
| lighter houses. Plus many areas are subject to tornados and
| hurricanes when it is rather pointless to build anything that
| lasts 100 years. On that time scale the house will be destroyed
| or badly damaged in any case.
| mcguire wrote:
| " _Atlanta has seen 77 tornadoes in the four counties of
| Clayton, Cobb, Dekalb and Fulton from 1950-2013. This is a
| density of 0.94 tornadoes per year per 1,000 square miles._ "
|
| 1,000 sq mi is about 640,000 acres, so that's .0000015
| tornadoes per year per acre. If I've got my math right,
| that's about a 99.9% chance that your 1 acre plot will not be
| hit by a tornado in 1000 years, if you live in the Atlanta
| area, which is only a middling high-probability area.
| (https://weather.com/storms/tornado/news/tornado-odds-of-
| bein...)
|
| Hurricanes are generally only a coastal problem, although
| flooding is a fairly large issue everywhere. (Don't get a
| house in a low lying area. Please.)
|
| Earthquakes are mostly a West Coast thing, modulo New Madrid
| (pronounced "mad-rid") and various oil drilling operations.
| But then there's fires and termites and everything else.
|
| There are plenty of hundred-year-old houses all over the US,
| as well as plenty of newer ones that could last more than a
| century with proper maintenance.
|
| Few houses today are built to last that long, though, because
| it's more expensive but doesn't add anything to the purchase
| price like granite countertops. Stick frame on slab
| construction is pretty close to mini-maxing housing
| construction as the article describes (even in areas where
| slab foundations are geologically idiotic).
|
| Anyway, when you get down to the second-to-last section of
| the article, remember that, past a certain point, efficiency
| is the enemy of resiliency.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| I lived in a wooden house with a brick facade from 1905 in
| San Francisco, so I think this is overstated.
|
| They have earthquakes in e.g. Italy and Turkey too, you know.
| fpoling wrote:
| On my visit to SF I saw a warning an a building that it did
| not satisfy earthquake safety standards of the government
| of California. A colleague explained that this was a common
| thing with old buildings in SF.
| estaseuropano wrote:
| I don't want to doubt you, but this sounds like 'folk wisdom'
| or 'common sense' logic, rather than fact. You are not
| seriously claiming that every piece of land is hit by
| earthquakes or hurricanes once every 50 years? While they get
| lots of attention my guess would be this is a shark attack-
| like phenomenon: its so unusual that its news worthy, which
| is why people think it is more frequent than it is.
|
| There are certainly earthquake (and hurricane) areas but the
| majority of the US population does not live in those. I'd
| need some risk/benefit analysis and actual data before
| believing they are even a factor in the equation for most
| people and areas. I can think of 100 other possible reasons
| (eg historically people moved frequently, or it was simply
| cheaper to rebuild than maintain as building
| standards/expectations change frequently, or in the cities
| you anyway expect someone to come in and buy up old building
| stock and rip it all down to put something bigger in, or ...
| ).
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| You are blessed with having quite a bit of ignorance in
| this subject, and therfore very much you can learn!
|
| See ASCE 7-16 Minimum Design Loads and Associated Criteria
| for Buildings and Other Structures, For wind: Chapters
| 26-31 for 144 pages of wind load design criteria.
| (California Building Code and International Building Codes
| recognize and point to that standard)
|
| Of particular note, is a concept called "Basic Wind Speed"
| which is derived from mapped values. What you'll find is
| that its intimately correlated with hurricane landing. Most
| people live on the coast in the US where the wind speed is
| highest. Depending on the risk category of the building, a
| typical value on the West coast is ~105 mph. On the east
| coast, it vaires by latitude from ~115-200 mph, increasing
| in all the areas that get hit by hurricanes. Despite your
| ignorance, I assure you it is a significant design concern.
|
| The seismic load is similar.
|
| Both loads are fundamentally designed to give a defined
| risk of failure from storms and earthquakes with particular
| recurrence intervals ranging from 50-100 years. (Offhand, I
| believe this value is ~1% for total collapse with a much
| higher risk of damage.). It is indeed carefully weighted
| and considered balance between risk reduction and
| feasibility, and indeed, having less than 1% risk for
| intervals over 100 years starts to get rather difficult. We
| still require it for schools, police stations, and
| emergency gathering locations and the like, but not normal
| houses. Anyway, OP is exaggerating slightly, but fairly
| spot on.
| manmal wrote:
| Please bear in mind that I don't mean the following in a
| cynic way. Damage from storms is horrible, and I feel for the
| families losing their homes every year.
|
| There was a tornado just a few days ago in the Czech Republic
| (not far from where I live), and as far as I can see, houses
| did lose their roofs, or the shingles at least, but the
| structures remained mostly intact. Many houses have basements
| in which people could hide in relative safety. Five people
| died unfortunately, not sure how many of those were in their
| homes at the time. But I think those rather sturdy houses
| made of bricks did infact save a lot of lives, and prevented
| many more from totally losing their home.
|
| To me it feels deeply illogical to build a house basically
| made of light wood frames when I know a hurricane can blow it
| away while I'm inside of it. I'm not sure about earthquakes,
| we have them of course, but they are less severe than in
| other areas in the world.
| strstr wrote:
| The frequency and maximum strength of tornadoes are higher
| in the central US. Casual skim of the wikipedia page
| indicates about as many F4 tornadoes in Europe as F5
| tornadoes in the US since 2000.
| octopoc wrote:
| There are many tornadoes where I live and most of the
| houses don't have basements. Directly in the path of the
| tornado, houses built on a slab were completely gone,
| leaving only a clean slab. This happened to a few entire
| neighborhoods.
|
| But, tornadoes here follow similar paths over a fifty year
| period. When I bought my house I found a hole in the fifty
| year tornado map and I've never had one come near me. Every
| couple decades the patterns may shift to other patterns,
| but generally speaking both the new patterns and old
| patterns have all happened in the last fifty years.
| ahnick wrote:
| > I found a hole in the fifty year tornado map
|
| What was your source for this information?
| manmal wrote:
| That's devastating. I wonder why houses in such areas are
| not required to provide underground shelter, or at least
| be built more solidly.
| mcguire wrote:
| After the 2011 tornadoes in the Southeast US, many
| communities built above-ground shelters (think "bunker"),
| with the downside being going any distance to a shelter
| is likely to be more dangerous than staying where you
| are. Also, many homeowners bought smaller above-ground
| shelters (think "steel pill-box").
| ghaff wrote:
| You cannot reasonably build solidly enough to withstand a
| high-level tornado unless you're talking underground
| bunkers, which are not an acceptable answer.
| manmal wrote:
| That's a bit defeatist, though? Efforts have been made,
| eg https://tigerprints.clemson.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?ar
| ticle=...
|
| It seems a concrete dome would also work if digging a
| bunker is too expensive. Yes it's not pretty, but not
| being afraid of dying during the next hurricane season
| must be worth something. A small dome can't cost much.
| ghaff wrote:
| Sure. Building a reinforced shelter for tornadoes,
| nuclear attack, etc. may make sense. Historically, in the
| US Midwest that meant going into the basement. But you
| don't live there.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Is it not?
|
| For a few decades the Swiss required building concrete
| nuclear fallout bunkers for every resident. This was
| relaxed only recently, but presumably it was doable for
| five decades. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-swiss-
| bunker/swiss-relax-...
| ghaff wrote:
| So you can be in a bunker above ground. At that point
| you're quibbling.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| Many places the basement would be under the water table
| or have to be carved out.
| crooked-v wrote:
| I just looked that up and that appears to have been an EF2
| tornado. That intensity deals an order of magnitude less
| damage than the EF3, EF4, and EF5 tornadoes that regularly
| appear in the US, which can literally tear entire houses
| off their foundations. A brick building in those conditions
| would be reduced to individual bricks.
| bradleyjg wrote:
| Hurricanes and earthquakes are one thing, but what
| percentage of the US population lives in areas regularly
| subject to EF3-5 tornadoes?
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| Much of the Midwest, which is 21% of the US population.
|
| Hurricanes are far more destructive and many spawn
| tornadoes. About 44% of Americans live in a Hurricane
| zone.
|
| Add earthquakes and fires maybe 60~70% of Americans live
| in a place with reoccurring natural disasters.
| [deleted]
| Kalium wrote:
| You might be surprised:
| https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/tornado-
| all...
|
| EF4 or EF5 tornadoes are around 2% of those in the US (ht
| tps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tornadoes_in_the_United_State
| s), which means any state with more than 34 or so a year
| can expect to see at least one. That accounts for 14
| states with a combined population of about 106 million
| people. That's approximately 32% of the total US
| population.
|
| 8%-ish of tornadoes rate EF3. At which point any state
| with seven or more a year should expect at least one in
| the EF3-5 range (yay, birthday paradox!). That's _32_
| states totaling 270 million people - 82% of the US.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| EF2 is not a measure of force of wind. It's a measure of
| total damage. . The wind speed was in the F4 category.
| manmal wrote:
| I read it was estimated to be F4. Brick houses are
| definitely less likely to be destroyed than timber.
| syoc wrote:
| Timber can be many things. I have a hard time seeing a
| log house being swept away by almost any force of wind.
| TylerE wrote:
| Then you don't appreciate the forces at play. An EF4 will
| rip deep rooted trees right out of the ground.
| dcolkitt wrote:
| It doesn't economic make sense to build homes to last 100+
| years. Equity markets have historically returned 8% per year.
| You're much better off cutting corners, investing the money,
| then fixing the problems in the future with your compounded
| wealth.
|
| Pretend you have two options, you can build a home that lasts
| forever or a house that will fall apart in a half century but
| is 10% cheaper. By year 40, you'll have enough wealth
| accumulated to buy _two_ new replacement homes.
| AngryData wrote:
| I mean there is no reason wooden structures shouldn't last over
| 100 years if not double or triple that except for lack of
| maintenance, usually involving leaking roof or a negligent
| design that traps water. I grew up in a house that was 150
| years old and the only thing not wooden on it was the roofing
| material, although when it was first built it likely was cedar
| shake. The walls were wood, the floors were wood, the siding
| was wood, and any interior plaster was backed with wood. We
| never had to question any of the woods condition despite the
| majority of it being completely original.
| manmal wrote:
| Let's add a lack of termites, no lightning strikes, and great
| care about open fires to the list of requirements. While I
| personally like the idea (and smell!) of pure wood houses, I
| would not want to live in one permanently. Wood is a great
| material for sure, but why not mix it with other materials to
| make things safer and more sturdy.
| insaneirish wrote:
| > but why not mix it with other materials to make things
| safer and more sturdy.
|
| Because wood is a renewable resource, not a source of
| carbon emissions (like concrete), and is absolutely strong
| enough for single family homes.
| belval wrote:
| One other drawback of wooden houses is that wood absorbs
| moisture so in winter you have to run a humidifier because
| the air moisture is basically non-existent and that will
| irritate your nose and throat.
|
| I'll take a typical drywall panels on a wooden frame over
| wooden walls.
| Johnny555 wrote:
| Wood can't continually absorb moisture, at some point it
| would become saturated.
|
| I always thought that the reason that winter air is dry
| is because warm air can hold more moisture than cold air,
| so as you heat it, relative humidity decreases. So, for
| example, if it's 5C outside with 50% relative humidity,
| if you heat that air to 22C, then it will have only 17%
| relative humidity.
|
| But modern houses (even wood ones) are so well sealed
| that even in winter you could end up with too _much_
| humidity inside just from normal activities (cooking,
| bathing, breathing).
| xyzzyz wrote:
| Termites are not a problem in huge swaths of the world,
| lightning strikes are... very unlikely, and fires will
| destroy any house, wood or not.
|
| All in all, correctly built wooden houses are pretty much
| as safe and sturdy as anything else.
| syoc wrote:
| Wood houses do not burn very well. Pure wood houses (think
| lumber cottages) are especially hard to set fire to.
|
| The things that do burn are furniture, paint, drapes etc
| and are present in any house.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| Because wood is plenty strong and safe.
|
| I've lived in wood houses all my life, all of them built
| between 1920 and 1950.
|
| Balloon construction has, generally speaking, been great.
| The frames are strong and light, easy to run
| cabling/utilities, easy to modify/remove/renovate (You know
| what else I've done in every house I've owned? Moved at
| least one wall - in my current house we just completely
| modified the layout of the upstairs. Moving the walls cost
| on the order of a few hundred dollars each, since they
| weren't structural supports, and it's just wood and
| drywall)
|
| Basically - They're cheaper, better for the environment,
| and when cared for last a LONG time. Do they have some
| specific downsides? Sure. But overall they work
| fantastically well.
|
| Also - if you think concrete is sturdier than wood
| frames... in most cases I suspect you're wrong for
| residential homes. I live in a temperate rain forest
| (Atlanta, GA) the pine trees are HUGE, and they fall
| constantly - they hit houses a lot. Most take damage, but
| it's usually easy to repair, and honestly, the wood frame
| alone usually keeps people inside safe. Hundreds of houses
| a year take tree hits, and having someone die is rare
| enough it usually makes the news. Wood is tough. I've seen
| a 100ft pine literally bounce off a house.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Every thread that's ever about US housing construction, some
| Europeans chime in to talk about how strange it seems to them
| to build houses out of wood, rather than stone/brick/etc that,
| as you put it, will "last for a very long time".
|
| Here's the thing, though: most Europeans seem to be suffering
| some pretty serious misconceptions.
|
| First, Americans build out of wood because we _have wood_ ,
| lots of it. Europeans don't skip wood because brick or stone is
| superior -- it's because Europe is _largely deforested_. Europe
| doesn 't _have_ wood for people to use at the same scale.
|
| Second, wooden houses last a plenty long time. "80-150+ years",
| as you put it, is entirely expected for a well-constructed
| wooden house. Neighborhoods that date from, say, 1850, e.g. in
| New England, have plenty of old wooden homes that people adore
| because of their character.
|
| Third, wood construction has a ton of advantages. Not only is
| it less expensive to build, but it's _tremendously_ more
| energy-efficient when filled with insulation. Brick and stone
| homes are absolute _energy guzzlers_ both in hot summers and
| cold winters. And remember, e.g. in New York State you 're
| dealing with 100degF (38degC) summers and -10degF (-23degC)
| winters. Insulation _matters_.
|
| The idea that American homes are somehow lower quality or
| shorter-lasting because they're built out of wood is a myth
| through and through. To the contrary, they're built out of wood
| because that's the _best_ construction for local climate and
| availability.
| zdragnar wrote:
| 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.
| newguy886 wrote:
| ROTFL
| bumbada wrote:
| Europe has much more density of people living in the same
| space. And Asia is even more dense.
|
| In the US there are things that do not make sense because
| people density is so low there, even in places like New York,
| most people live in individual homes, spread over a big area.
|
| When I was living in China I saw lost of things made sense that
| do not make sense in Europe just by the economic of scale of so
| much people living in such small areas.
| marcinzm wrote:
| >In the US there are things that do not make sense because
| people density is so low there, even in places like New York,
| most people live in individual homes, spread over a big area.
|
| That's patently false. In NYC only 9% of homes are single
| unit detached and in NY state it's only 41%.
| 411111111111111 wrote:
| While it's true that Europe has a few cities that are
| significantly more dense then new York, your phrasing makes
| it sound like the average town is more dense then NY is...
| And that's not the case
|
| I don't know the exact number, but there are very few cities
| in Europe with a density higher then NY (10,716.36
| people/km2), and i'm pretty sure they're all in France,
| Greece and Italy
| IshKebab wrote:
| The use of bricks over wood can't be due to population
| density because the practice goes back hundreds of years.
|
| I think it is partly due to tradition, and partly due to
| climate differences.
| manmal wrote:
| I think it has to do with prices and available know-how.
| You can build a typical US home for 1/2 or less than a
| Central European home. Right now, if I were to build a
| 150m2 (1600sqft) home, that would cost me at least EUR250k.
| More likely 300. Zoning often requires houses to be of a
| certain build and look, so building cheaper than that is
| often not even an option. As far as I know, a US home of
| that size usually costs $100k? Please someone correct me if
| I'm wrong.
| greedo wrote:
| The average cost per square foot for new construction is
| between $100-$155 in the US. That might be a bit low
| considering current lumber prices though. So a 1600 sq/ft
| house would be between $160K-$248K.
| manmal wrote:
| Thank you!
| xyzzyz wrote:
| I think it is pretty conceivable that structural lumber
| could have been more expensive than bricks in the past.
| Before modernity, there was scarcely enough food for
| everyone, so using it for something like forest would have
| been relatively expensive. For this reason, today more
| Europe is covered with forests than in 1700. On the other
| hand, bricks only need small amount of land for extraction
| of substrates, and some fuel, which didn't have to be prime
| firewood like we're used to now, but more like thin twigs
| from coppiced trees.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| I am just going to say one thing: Superadobe.
| brianolson wrote:
| Framing is a plausible place to optimize, so how about steel? The
| factory cuts all the pieces to be assembled on site. It goes up
| real fast. This is what we want, right?
| lostapathy wrote:
| At very small scales, this is already done with wood framing.
| There are vendors that will send out a pre-cut framing package
| with every piece of wood cut and marked, and even stacked in
| the right order for fairly optimal assembly.
|
| The trouble is that most house plans are not put together to a
| sufficient level of detail for this to work - contractors rely
| on all kinds of field decisions/adjustments.
| trunnell wrote:
| I recently read Gates' book _How To Avoid a Climate Disaster_
| which left me with the impression that the overriding factor in
| building costs is the energy required (and CO2 produced) for
| construction, heating, and cooling.
|
| Unfortunately I didn't see any mention of energy or carbon in
| this post.
|
| Seems like the biggest breakthrough would be a pre-construction
| estimate of energy costs over, say, 30 years. Similar to the
| Energy Star sticker on appliances sold in the US which tell you
| the cost to run a given appliance with typical usage compared to
| the range for other models.
|
| This would allow you justify spending more upfront for better
| insulation, HVAC, air sealing, etc. and recoup that over time. At
| scale this would allow our civilization to be more energy
| efficient and reduce the need to build more power plants.
|
| This suggestion stood out: "...move to resistance heating and
| thermoelectric cooling"
|
| Unless I'm missing something, this would be a step backward.
| Modern heat pumps are 3-4x more efficient than resistance
| heating, since they aren't creating heat but moving it from one
| place to another. For cooling, if the author is referring to
| Peltier type thermoelectric cooling, the same applies: heat pumps
| are many times more efficient.
|
| The building revolution we need is one that cheaply produces
| extremely energy-efficient homes, IMO.
| rhinoceraptor wrote:
| This video is a great explainer on heat pumps [1]. The TL;DR is
| that they are essentially nothing more than air conditioners
| that run in the opposite direction. Plus, a heat pump and an
| air conditioner can be combined into a single system.
|
| 1: https://youtu.be/7J52mDjZzto
| wffurr wrote:
| Heat pumps need plumbing and installation which increases the
| construction cost.
|
| Agreed that they are the way to go, but it's not going to bring
| down construction costs.
|
| The author's strawman proposal was a nuclear battery for
| effectively unlimited onsite power with the no marginal cost in
| order to minimize construction costs.
| bumbada wrote:
| >Vinyl flooring, vinyl siding, one-piece shower stalls, and
| laminate countertops are examples of innovations that reduce the
| cost and increase durability.
|
| Vynil is one of the worst thing you could have in your house. And
| the production of it is horrible for the environment too.
|
| Vynil chemical group is not toxic, but the "Polyvinyl chloride"
| people are referring to when they talk about "Vynil" is. It is
| extremely toxic because of the chemical additives it has like
| plasticizers that are breathable and never go away in your body.
|
| It is also extremely toxic when burn as it generates dioxins, and
| flame retardants are added to it, also very toxic.
|
| It is also extremely cheap so people use it so much over big
| surfaces.
|
| It is great for plumbing and I would only use it for that use.
|
| But don't use it on big surfaces because you and your family are
| going to breath its additives when it is exposed to sunlight.
| jackcosgrove wrote:
| I think we already have the future of housing: mobile homes.
|
| With remote work gaining acceptance, location will lose its
| premium for many. Socially we have pared down our living
| arrangements to small nuclear families if that, which can fit in
| a mobile home.
|
| Mobile homes offer better protection against deterioration of a
| real estate or job market, and also better opportunities for
| moving to a growing market. Mobility is in the name.
|
| Trailer parks have a bad rap because of classism. But the less
| well-off are often trailblazers because they need to make things
| work with less.
|
| The mobile homes of tomorrow need not be run-down single-wides.
| They could be more luxurious and larger if broken apart into
| components.
|
| I think this is mostly a marketing and image problem which is
| only starting to change, mostly because of cost-of-land
| pressures.
| toast0 wrote:
| > Mobile homes offer better protection against deterioration of
| a real estate or job market, and also better opportunities for
| moving to a growing market. Mobility is in the name.
|
| Mobility is in the name, but not in reality. Once you install a
| mobile home, it's expensive and unlikely to move it and install
| it somewhere else. It's better to call these buy their new
| name, manufactured homes, which eliminates the misconception
| from having mobile in the name.
|
| Now, that doesn't mean they couldn't be the future of housing,
| but it doesn't seem to be what developers are building or what
| people are buying when they've got choices. I think the cost
| difference vs a wood framed house built on site doesn't make up
| for the lack of flexibility.
| handrous wrote:
| > Mobility is in the name, but not in reality.
|
| "Mobile" wasn't in the name, originally. "Mobile" (Alabama)
| was.
| bradleyjg wrote:
| A few people have made this point in this thread. There's
| still actual trailers ("RV") though, which is what the
| grandparent poster meant.
| landryraccoon wrote:
| If I'm reading this correctly, optimizing construction costs is a
| very difficult problem because a huge part of the costs is
| transportation, not the material itself or assembly thereof.
|
| Transportation is by nature highly distributed among a wide range
| of actors, unlike industries like semiconductors where the costs
| are centralized in a factory where a single agent can optimize
| everything.
|
| In other words, the majority of improving construction costs is
| actually a political problem, and engineers are unsuited to
| optimizing it. Transportation costs can be reduced, but only at a
| collective, national or state-wide level. Moving vast quantities
| of lumber, insulation, wiring, drywall, roofing and other housing
| materials across state lines is much more a political
| coordination problem than an engineering one. Sure, a team of
| engineers could design a more efficient, cost effective
| transportation method - but how would consensus ever be achieved
| to actually build the thing and align all the disparate interest
| groups to rally around it rather than opposing it?
|
| My hot take is that in the current era (at least in the United
| States) "Smart" people have neglected political concerns in favor
| of technical concerns. But the risks aren't technical, they are
| political, so this is inefficient. The problem will not be solved
| simply by engineering, no matter how clever the engineers are, if
| they are limited to purely technical approaches.
| wallacoloo wrote:
| I think I need a more concrete example. In many distributed
| networks, you can add a new path to it, and if that path is
| cheaper, then neighboring entities will (gradually) adopt it
| for cost savings. So if I developed a way to transport material
| between Seattle and NYC more efficiently, a bunch of individual
| actors will gravitate toward using that route. In a distributed
| system, I wouldn't need any external approval to do that, and
| other participants would be free to choose to interact with me:
| it's not political so much as it is markets.
|
| Is your claim that any improvement to the system will
| inevitably conflict with a centralized authority -- like a
| regional government that has to approve commerce or land use?
| Is your argument that it's a political problem because it's
| _not_ , actually, distributed?
| R0b0t1 wrote:
| How are you going to transport materials more cheaply? I work
| in manufacturing and a large part of the ultimate bill is
| S&H. We need to pass that onto our customers. Shipping is
| bearable outside of the US but as soon as you enter into the
| US it will eat your margins and leave nothing.
|
| As I understand it the main cost in S&H is personnel, as with
| most businesses. So either you need more automation or higher
| wages for the people who need to buy S&H services.
| wallacoloo wrote:
| > As I understand it the main cost in S&H is personnel, as
| with most businesses. So either you need more automation or
| higher wages for the people who need to buy S&H services.
|
| You just highlighted one opportunity for a technological
| improvement ("automation"). Warehouse automation: a
| decades-long trend which -- while it can be slowed -- so
| far seems to be unstoppable by political force. Driverless
| vehicles and drones: which, which technical solutions, and
| contingent upon political outcomes. OTOH 90% of the
| politics is around how these will be deployed on _public_
| land and air space, and those politics could be avoided if
| the players decided to build their own infrastructure like
| the big railroads did back in the day. Etc.
| lostapathy wrote:
| > So if I developed a way to transport material between
| Seattle and NYC more efficiently
|
| I think the point wasn't that we need to make this trip
| cheaper, but that we need to figure out a way to build houses
| with materials that travel less.
| wallacoloo wrote:
| Two sides of the same coin, no? You can lower the
| transportation costs of materials either by doing less of
| it (as you suggest), or by decreasing the cost per
| weight/volume/distance (my earlier comment).
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| It's complicated. Here in southwest, we have suitable
| (clayish) soil for building adobe with all over the place.
| Very little transportation in terms of miles compared to
| lumber, bricks etc.
|
| However ... extremely labor intensive and compared to stick
| framing, relatively slow. So, despite its local-ness, huge
| thermal mass and excellent karma, adobe loses out and
| stick-framed OSB sheathed things that look like adobe win.
| lostapathy wrote:
| But perhaps that's exactly where we need investment - to
| figure out a way to apply automation to adobe type
| building?
|
| Unfortunately this isn't the kind of thing the market is
| good at sorting out, but there could well be some
| breakthrough tech that makes adobe building cheap. We
| just don't look for it.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| There have been attempts over the centuries. Rammed earth
| walls attempt to do away with the "dealing with lots of
| relative small pieces" problem (adobe bricks). But they
| require form building, which adds a significant labor
| component that isn't there for the "lots of small pieces"
| approach.
| kingsuper20 wrote:
| > If I'm reading this correctly, optimizing construction costs
| is a very difficult problem because a huge part of the costs is
| transportation, not the material itself or assembly thereof.
|
| You have to go beyond the first section.
|
| His main points are that (a) it's hard to standardize on the
| larger parts and (b) there is no low hanging fruit.
| gpm wrote:
| > You have to go beyond the first section.
|
| Please don't imply people didn't read the article. It's
| boring, unnecessarily rude, against the guidelines [1], and
| at least in this case I _did_ read the entire article and
| agree with that comment.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| > (b) there is no low hanging fruit.
|
| There is no low hanging fruit _when you divide up the pricing
| the way he did_ , but transportation is part of nearly every
| category that he divided it up into. From the data he shows
| we don't have any reason to think that transportation is not
| a single substantial fraction of the house cost, when you
| some up all the different transportation costs between the
| different sections he uses.
|
| To make an analogy to programming, transportation is like an
| allocator, and his data shows that execution time is spent
| evenly between 20 different functions. But all of those
| functions allocate, it's perfectly plausible the program is
| spending 50% of it's time in it's allocator and that speeding
| up that allocator by 50% would reduce the overall execution
| time by 25%.
| Fiahil wrote:
| This kind of article depress me to the highest point. I'm not a
| "consumer" with "expensive taste", nor someone who put a brake on
| innovation.
|
| I want a house built to last, by a skilled professional, with
| wood, steel, stones, and slates. Less plastics and only locally
| sourced materials. If I'm going to live there for the next half
| century, it better be a place I love.
|
| Please stop pushing your capitalism and your economy of scale in
| every corner of the world.
| cies wrote:
| > I'm not a "consumer" with "expensive taste"
|
| Saying so does not make it true. If you want to live in a
| house, your a consumer of house. If you like a nicer than most
| basic/economic house because "I'm going to live there for the
| next half century, it better be a place I love"; voila there
| come the expensive taste.
|
| Author explained where and where not the scale-upping worked in
| construction. It seems author was on point, even in your case.
|
| To author does not shove anything down our reader throats by
| saying how it is. You link to capitalism is pretty far of: the
| scale-upping worked really well in socialist places as well, in
| fact Marx himself obsessed over industrial scale-upping. You
| seem to be misguided over what capitalism actually means
| (spoiler alert: a system of law/govt that protects a person's
| hoarded wealth ad infinitum).
| jessaustin wrote:
| You don't have to let the capitalists build your house. All
| building trades of today and (especially) yesterday are
| accessible to capable people.
|
| First, however, you're going to have to come to terms with the
| fact that "professional" is a capitalist word.
| readflaggedcomm wrote:
| Capitalists build for ourselves as amateurs, hobbyists, or
| artisans, too. Do we offend you as much as dog whistles do?
| [deleted]
| WJW wrote:
| > I'm not a "consumer" with "expensive taste",
|
| But also
|
| > I want a house built to last, by a skilled professional,
|
| > only locally sourced materials
|
| Pick one or the other mate, those points don't mix well.
| alkonaut wrote:
| Having natural materials instead of vinyl isn't exactly
| extravagant...
|
| Did that article suggest vinyl siding, as in the exterior of
| a building using plastic?
| Kalium wrote:
| It specifically mentions vinyl siding as a cheap option
| that better-off consumers spend money to avoid in favor of
| more expensive wood or brick.
|
| Extravagance is perhaps, at times, a matter of perspective
| and opinion. Some might consider consciously choosing more
| costly materials, even if they happen to be natural
| materials, to be matters of aesthetic choice that increase
| cost. Or even expensive tastes.
| alkonaut wrote:
| I think in any scenario I'd rather refurbish half as
| often or build half the size and use "better" materials.
|
| Same as buying "good" meat at 2x (better cuts, organic,
| etc) isn't a costly extravagance if you simply buy half
| as much by eating less of it each time or having meat
| less often.
|
| If there is one thing you immediately notice when you
| visit the US for example is you often see homes that are
| of quite shoddy quality but might be 2500sq ft or even
| 3000. I'd trade 500sq ft for a decent countertop alone...
| Kalium wrote:
| That's an excellent point! It also provides a handy
| analytical framework. I'm going to try apply it to
| siding.
|
| The cost differential between brick and vinyl siding can
| easily be a factor of five, and wood vs vinyl a factor of
| six (stone is more like 25). At this point you're trading
| 2400-2500 sqft of that 3000 sqft house to use "better"
| materials, assuming shapes that scale surface area
| directly with flooring size.
|
| I expect this resulting cottage will be of wonderfully
| high-quality materials, but you may run into a few limits
| on how many people you can have comfortably living there
| compared to the original 3000 sqft building. I imagine
| you might want to be somewhere in between, at which point
| your choice of "better" materials may become an
| extravagance in the eyes of some.
| alkonaut wrote:
| Not sure why wood is so expensive, I'm paying under $2/m
| or for cladding wood for the extension I'm building now.
| Its around $1 per square foot. It gets slightly more
| expensive before it's painted 3 times though (repeat
| every 15 years as is standard with softwood).
|
| I'm fairly sure I couldn't find a cheaper exterior
| cladding. And obviously the cladding is a tiny percentage
| of the total cost of even just the wall, let alone the
| whole construction. Cladding will be sub $300 and the 150
| sq ft extension is north of $50k all together. Insulation
| is probably 3-5x what the cladding is, and so is the
| flooring.
| Kalium wrote:
| The numbers I'm using include installation costs too.
| Wood and brick are more labor than vinyl as I understand
| it.
|
| I think my key lesson here is that even building smaller,
| using "better" materials is an expensive matter of taste.
| alkonaut wrote:
| Painting is a bit of work but just nailing up standard
| wooden cladding is such a tiny part of the work it hardly
| even shows up on the total, including labor!
|
| Perhaps this is partially because of the high buikding
| costs to begin with (It's cold so walls are 3-400mm, a
| single window is $6-700 (triple glass) and so on. The BOM
| for my extension was $25k which is half the total.
| Cladding _including_ labor is a lot less than $1k. I have
| never seen a vinyl clad house but I doubt I'd pick one to
| save that little.
| [deleted]
| tootie wrote:
| I feel like that's based on some naturalism fallacies. Durable
| plastic is more efficient to produce that growing a tree. And
| sourcing thingy locally isn't always practical. You want the
| best lumber for the job that will last and that's usually
| cultivated at scale. You can chop down trees from your backyard
| or you'll destroy your neighborhood.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| There's almost no such thing as durable plastic when you're
| talking about the lifetimes of traditional building material.
| As a result, without a genuine recyling process for plastic
| (rather than just "down cycling"), even if there was nothing
| wrong with it during its normal lifetime, it just becomes
| more trash at the end. Quite different for wood (stone,
| glass, adobe, even concrete).
| 015UUZn8aEvW wrote:
| Great essay. This is a much more sophisticated analysis of
| construction efficiency than you typically find; most of them
| basically imply that construction is inefficient because
| contractors are dumb.
|
| One minor comment: balloon framing is not a synonym for light
| wood framing, it's a (mostly archaic) version of it. Balloon
| framing features long exterior wall studs that extend up multiple
| stories, as opposed to modern "platform framing", in which the
| studs stop at each floor.
| jakewins wrote:
| Came here to say exactly this. Balloon framing was abandoned
| due to fires. This made me hesitant about the rest of the text.
| brudgers wrote:
| Balloon framing is, like all construction, more common in
| some regions than others.
|
| Short construction seasons are somewhat favorable to it. Dry
| in can be quicker. A trade base familiar with the necessary
| fire blocking makes it practical. Same with designers and
| inspectors.
|
| The sun belt tends toward platform framing. Being the
| sunbelt, construction tends to be more year round.
| lostapathy wrote:
| Where specifically is balloon framing done now? Genuinely
| curious as I know people who have posted construction
| pictures all over the country and I've never seen it.
| aardvarkr wrote:
| Saying something is invalid due to a personal choice in
| vernacular is quite brazen and ignorant... it's like writing
| off someone's opinion because they used the wrong
| their/they're/there
| gpm wrote:
| If I was reading an article about grammar and the author
| used the wrong version of their/they're/there I would
| seriously consider whether or not I should stop reading it.
| earleybird wrote:
| Would you clarify your comment please. Are you saying
| balloon vs platform framing is a personal choice?
| function_seven wrote:
| It's more than "personal choice in vernacular". Someone
| speaking authoritatively on construction methods should
| know the differences in terms. Calling a vertical wall
| framing member a "joist" would be just as wrong.
|
| Balloon framing and platform framing are different,
| exclusive terms. Author uses it as a catch-all for stick
| framing throughout the article.
|
| The rest of the article seems fine and insightful, but it's
| totally reasonable to see that incorrect terminology usage
| as an indicator of knowledge gaps. And the author appears
| to be more involved with cryptography and related concepts,
| so it tracks.
| aardvarkr wrote:
| As a layman I hadn't heard either term so I looked it up while
| reading the essay and the overwhelming opinion I found is that
| platform framing is a variant of balloon framing that has
| completely replaced the original method due to fires in 1860
| (Chicago) and 1903 (San Fran). most of what I read said the
| terms used the terms interchangeably
| steffan wrote:
| Another likely reason is that balloon framing makes use of
| single studs that extend the height of the structure, with
| the 2nd floor suspended. The nature of available framing
| lumber has shifted and it would be likely much more expensive
| and difficult to obtain satisfactory 16'-20' studs vs. the
| more common 8' length.
| avernon wrote:
| Thanks! If I would have known it would go to front page of
| Hacker News I would have had one of my construction science
| friends proof read it first!
|
| I've been writing for fun and to learn and have always been
| curious about construction productivity.
| brudgers wrote:
| The problem is that construction schedules are NP hard. And
| that optimization is expensive due to market efficiency for
| labor.
| kingsuper20 wrote:
| >most of them basically imply that construction is inefficient
| because contractors are dumb.
|
| Yeah, that's a problem.
|
| Usually, next up is some handwaving about building homes from
| shipping containers because they're rectangular.
| iandanforth wrote:
| I was onsite at a modular manufacturer today and I can tell you a
| lot of what is said here is just wrong. The cost estimate is not
| quality adjusted. If you look at cost per square foot and don't
| take into account the quality of work provided then you haven't
| calculated anything worth knowing. Also the article doesn't price
| out the value of speed. Modular can take half the time to move-in
| as stick build.
|
| I agree there are plenty of points for improving efficiency. For
| example the builder I visited was not vertically integrated at
| all. They bought manufacturing time on a modular line for their
| box plans, worked with external designers and all kinds of subs
| they can't guarantee for onsite work. But having seen it up close
| I can tell you there is far more opportunity for process
| improvement on a assembly line (even if each build is custom)
| than there is in the field.
|
| If you look to Japan, Toyota is getting into modular with steel
| framing that is way ahead of anything in the states. I look
| forward to that being available here.
| [deleted]
| opportune wrote:
| I don't understand the worldwide disdain for the concrete paneled
| construction the article briefly mentions:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khrushchyovka
|
| Most of the "badness" people associate with these, IMO, are due
| more to the fact that 1. in recent times they are inhabited by
| less well-off people 2. they usually need to be washed or
| painted, probably because they are inhabited by less well-off
| people who don't make it a priority 3. to the extent they are
| seen as crime/drug dens, that's because they have a stigma/are in
| disrepair so only poor people want to live there. It is possible
| for them to be nice, even moreso if they are new (and not poorly
| maintained, 60 years old). See
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zelenograd as an example of a city
| with this style (go to Google images for more pictures). The
| whole city is like a park.
|
| From an urban planning perspective, they have a lot of benefits.
| People can actually end up with a lot of green space in between
| buildings. They make it easy to set up bus or train-based public
| transportation, with walking a viable way to navigate toward a
| hub. The density creates obvious economies of scale in other
| areas. From a cost perspective, they are inexpensive to construct
| because of the economies of scale. The article mentions them as
| one of the few building styles amenable to mass-
| production/assembly off-site.
|
| Probably my main gripe is that they are not often 'mixed use' and
| could perhaps do with shops on the first floor, though this is
| partially an artifact of the economic regime under which they
| were mostly built.
| OminousWeapons wrote:
| The worldwide disdain arises from what you said, the additional
| association with communism / cheapness, and the fact that they
| are mass produced, generic, and boring, and no one wants to
| spend a lot of money to get generic and boring.
| nine_k wrote:
| If McMansions aand cookie-cutter suburban communities are any
| indication, some still want to spend a lot of money on
| generic and boring.
|
| The reasons must be different.
| OminousWeapons wrote:
| McMansions are ugly but they're not boring or generic.
| Unless you're in a housing development, most are fairly
| unique. Units in housing developments do suffer from the
| same stigma though, and a lot of people won't buy them for
| that very reason, even though they are generally cheaper
| than units located outside of those developments.
|
| The problem is really the combination of all 3 factors.
| McMansions definitely make people think the inhabitants
| have no taste, but they don't make people think the
| inhabitants are poor. Buildings that look like public
| housing make people think the inhabitants are poor, which
| is worse for a lot of people.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| It seems to me... people will spend a lot of money to get a
| generic, boring, mass produced version of what their
| parents generation thought was luxurious or classy.
|
| McMansions + perfect lawn in a suburb full of curves and
| crescents; and various kinds of "luxury" cars, big TVs,
| etc. All things _just_ out of reach of many of our middle
| class parents or grandparents. So now you 've _made_ it
| when you have it... until you look close and see there 's
| no actual class differentiator in it, no taste to it, no
| art to it, or any particular advantage to it...
|
| Just my, like, opinion, man...
| orthoxerox wrote:
| Seam insulation is an issue, modern apartment blocks in Russia
| use monolithic concrete instead.
| Animats wrote:
| It's hard to rent out all those street level shops. The tenants
| of a 4-6 story structure can't support those shops. There are
| not enough residents per shop for that. Such places are not
| usually convenient to drive to. The SF peninsula is getting way
| too many of those things. Many shops are vacant.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| Then the rent is too high for the ground-floor businesses.
| Lower the rent to allow niche retailers to use those
| storefronts as the physical presence for a largely online
| business. However, it's often in the owner's financial
| interest to leave them vacant at a high rent so they can make
| up the difference by charging extortionate rents to the
| businesses who bring in enough revenue to afford it. That's
| why those first floors are inevitably filled with banks,
| Starbucks, and Chipotle.
| opportune wrote:
| I used to live on the Peninsula and know what you mean. It's
| worth mentioning though that you don't need a shop, or
| multiple, in every building. It would be enough for there to
| be a smattering of convenience stores and basic common
| services like barbers and salons. Moreover, they are not
| meant to be driveable so long as the surrounding density is
| sufficient. Polk Street in SF is very inconvenient to drive
| to but the shops there seem to do quite well.
| marcinzm wrote:
| >The tenants of a 4-6 story structure can't support those
| shops.
|
| In the polish version of these, the stores are in one
| building of the cluster of 4+ buildings, generally on the
| main street of the area. The US has a retail store for every
| 500 people or so which is about how many fit into a few of
| these buildings..
|
| >Such places are not usually convenient to drive to.
|
| You don't drive to them, you take whatever local public
| transportation there is or walk. It's dense enough that you
| can visit all the important stores without driving or leaving
| your local area.
|
| >Many shops are vacant.
|
| That has more to do with the increasing rents and commercial
| rates being locked in for 5+ years. More economical to keep
| the place vacant for the landlord.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| Agree except for the US _does_ have way to much total
| retail, out of line with other countries.
|
| But that's a minor point.
| marcinzm wrote:
| Do you have data for that? Having visited a number of
| countries in Europe, Japan and the US I've found roughly
| the same number of retail stores (at least in terms of
| area). The US tends to have fewer but larger stores in my
| experience. For example, Google indicates that Germany
| alone has almost as many grocery stores as the US despite
| being a fraction of the population.
| grouphugs wrote:
| i don't have a home
| 4b11b4 wrote:
| I was hoping this was going to be an article about building with
| earth, but it's stuck in the same framework of thinking.
| abraxas wrote:
| Earthships are not cheap nor any other rammed earth style
| building. It's cool stuff but definitely not cheap.
| zarzavat wrote:
| Semi-autonomous road convoys and electric trucks are technologies
| that are in development. That may completely alter the calculus
| of the article and unlock those economies of scale that are
| missing at the moment.
| Grakel wrote:
| That's a long way to say construction is already optimized for
| our current level of technology.
| f38zf5vdt wrote:
| A somewhat less meandering explanation for the modern dominance
| of balloon framing, which also draws parallels to software
| development:
|
| https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/balloon-framing-i...
| redtexture wrote:
| Balloon framing has been gone for nearly a century, which
| implies no firestops between floors.
|
| Stick built framing is the follow on, also called plate
| building, the plates constituting inter-floor fire stops.
| aaron695 wrote:
| > Almost every advancement in construction is small enough for
| someone to carry
|
| > Each advancement fits within a simple construction system.
|
| Powerful idea.
| robotbikes wrote:
| Nuclear batteries removing the need for electrical wiring seems
| very pie in the sky to me but perhaps I'm just ignorant of the
| practical application of it.
|
| Concrete seems far more common in residential construction
| outside of the U.S. I wonder if technologies such as aircrete
| (concrete with uniform foam produced air bubbles).
|
| Also well There's Your Problem had an interesting article about
| the 5-1 construction that is used for a lot of new apartment
| buildings in the U.S.
| https://wtyppod.podbean.com/e/episode-46-five-over-ones/
| vbezhenar wrote:
| Aerated concrete is extremely popular in Kazakhstan and Russia
| in private houses. It's cheaper than bricks, it's sturdy
| enough, it provides good insulation, it does not require much
| skill to use, pieces are huge, so it's much faster to build.
|
| There are drawbacks, of course, but overall it's a very popular
| technology.
| jessaustin wrote:
| _...it provides good insulation..._
|
| This might be true, but it would be surprising, since even
| "aerated" concrete would still be made of highly thermally
| conductive... _concrete_.
| R0b0t1 wrote:
| The thermal mass of your house is part of the perceived
| insulation. In the desert especially nights are cold, the
| house chills, and retains that chill throughout the day,
| keeping it cool inside.
| earleybird wrote:
| Thermal mass to manage comfort could be seen as tuning
| latency for your arrival and departure of your heat
| packets.
| elihu wrote:
| If memory serves, normal concrete has an R value of about 1
| per foot, whereas AAC is more like 1 to 2 per inch. So, an
| 8 inch wall would have an R-value of about 8-16. That
| doesn't seem like enough for a cold climate, so I'd assume
| for those applications you'd probably add an extra layer of
| actual insulation. (This would mean having pretty thick
| walls.) You wouldn't need as much supplemental insulation
| as you would with a regular concrete wall, though.
|
| The thermal mass is also nice, though it doesn't really
| help much in winter-time. I think AAC is a bit more suited
| to warm desert climates where you have a daily hot/cold
| cycle.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| 20-inch wall is enough for pretty cold climate according
| to my calculations. Either that or thin wall with
| insulation (or thin wall and more money on heating which
| might be an acceptable solution, if you have cheap coal
| and your country does not care what you build).
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Fairly sure that AAC has less thermal mass than regular
| concrete. It's more air, less concrete, and the thermal
| mass comes from the concrete.
| orthoxerox wrote:
| Here in Russia it usually requires an external layer of
| insulation plus cladding, you don't just stucco it and call
| it a day. I did the math and a wall two blocks thick should
| be barely sufficient, but needs a vapour barrier inside, or
| the dew point will be inside the wall, ruining it. A vapour
| barrier and a drywall finish means no reduction in
| construction costs.
| fpoling wrote:
| In has been popular in the whole former USSR. But for some
| reason in past it was not considered as a suitable material
| for houses, only for storage facilities etc. But it could be
| just a cultural perception.
|
| For example, my father built a temporary house from it in
| Belarus in 1980s while waiting for the main house
| construction that was using ordinary bricks. I remember as a
| child that building from aerated concrete was indeed very
| quick affair.
| ArkanExplorer wrote:
| Disadvantages From Wikipedia:
|
| "Installation during rainy weather: AAC is known to crack
| after installation, which can be avoided by reducing the
| strength of the mortar and ensuring the blocks are dry
| during and after installation.
|
| Brittle nature: they need to be handled more carefully than
| clay bricks to avoid breakage.
|
| Attachments: the brittle nature of the blocks requires
| longer, thinner screws when fitting cabinets and wall
| hangings and wood-suitable drill bits or hammering in.
| Special, large diameter wall plugs (anchors) are available
| at a higher cost than common wall plugs.
|
| Insulation requirements in newer building codes of northern
| European countries would require very thick walls when
| using AAC alone. Thus many builders choose to use
| traditional building methods installing an extra layer of
| insulation around the entire building."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoclaved_aerated_concrete
| kingsuper20 wrote:
| >Aerated concrete is extremely popular in Kazakhstan and
| Russia in private houses.
|
| In California (FWIW), I expect that you hit seismic issues.
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| Problem in California is insane mandated R values for
| walls. Aerated concrete can meet previous standards. But
| not the new ones. So it's use is effectively banned.
|
| Old saw about Generals fighting the last war. Energy
| efficiency standards assume the need to conserve limited
| supplies for fossil fuels. And the need to not interfere
| with building large houses for upper middle class people.
|
| Bad thing is R value is a metric designed to upsell
| insulation. R30 insulation is twice as good as R15, if
| you're the guy selling it. If you're the guy buying it, not
| as much.
| bolangi wrote:
| I know a guy who researched aerated concrete. He used a slimy
| additive to help hold the bubbles. Basically, the compression
| strength of concrete is so much higher than necessary that
| addition of a large portion of air results in a material that
| is much lighter with more than adequate compression strength.
| He couldn't find interest among concrete companies in his
| state.
| elihu wrote:
| I think in the U.S. the only place that makes the stuff
| (Aercon) is in Florida, and there's Hebel that has a plant in
| Mexico near Texas.
| R0b0t1 wrote:
| > Nuclear batteries removing the need for electrical wiring
| seems very pie in the sky to me but perhaps I'm just ignorant
| of the practical application of it.
|
| tl;dr very feasible sans NIMBYs
|
| The DoE investigated this exact thing. I happened across the
| papers while browsing microfiche. It makes the most sense to
| serve a neighborhood off small house/shed sized generating
| facility. As you scale up you can switch to normal turbine
| operation, as you scale down you move back to thermoelectric
| operation. Single houses could be powered from thermoelectric
| piles but this would probably have been reserved for expensive,
| remote vacation homes.
|
| Closer to battery sized, you can layer radioactive material
| against quantum dots that turn alpha particles into photons and
| emit those photons directly onto a PV cell.
| tootie wrote:
| I thought the point about modular wiring was interesting. Why
| aren't all wall studs fitted with grommeted mouseholes at
| outlet and switch height?
| elihu wrote:
| I think that was kind of a whimsical suggestion; like, even if
| you had a magical technology that eliminated all need for
| electrical wiring, you'd still only reduce building costs by a
| small amount.
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| I've thought that creating a 100-150 watt power over Ethernet
| standard for home wiring would be a win. Advantage faster
| install, cheaper cabling, and better safety. Better safety
| because you can limit the default power to under 15W. Faster
| install because you use crimp connectors.
| imgabe wrote:
| What if you want to plug in a vacuum cleaner, hair dryer,
| space heater, curling iron, or any other thing that might
| use more than 150 watts?
| ben_w wrote:
| Nuclear batteries have their place, but consumer products are
| not it.
|
| First, you can't switch them off, so they are either always
| warm or the are trickle-charging another storage system
| (batteries, capacitors, whatever) within the device.
|
| Second, the radiation. You can do various things to limit the
| risk, but the LD50 is something like 0.25 watts of absorbed
| ionising radiation sustained for 18 minutes, so damage to the
| batteries (malicious or accidental) would have significantly
| greater harms than, say, asbestos, CFCs, or domestic carbon
| monoxide sources.
|
| You absolutely do not want a 10 watt lightbulb powered by
| built-in atomic batteries anywhere it can get messed with, let
| alone a 2 kW kettle or a 5 kW oven.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acute_radiation_syndrome
| jeffbee wrote:
| The article does not even mention planning and permitting until
| the last sentence, but in my city that is virtually all of the
| cost. Fancy cabinet faces have _nothing_ to do with the fact that
| a house costs $2 million.
|
| When I look at what techies are trying to do I just shake my
| head. Factory_OS built an apartment building on Union Street in
| Oakland "in ten days " but planning, permitting, site prep,
| finishing, and inspections added up to seven years. Believing
| that off-site fabrication helps this problem is right up there
| with believing that hyperloops can solve traffic jams, in the
| universe of nonsensical American beliefs.
| failwhaleshark wrote:
| Favelas tin-roof shanties would be cheaper too.
|
| In the US, why not distribute value, transportation, and land
| sufficiently so people can have a better basic standard of
| living? Right now, I'm looking at 1000 homeless people and tents
| huddling under a highway, while my drunken idiot neighbors shout
| and dance with glee feet from them in a gentrifying, mixed-use
| development pool. The people who have just enough have no shame
| or consideration because their motto is "F U, I got mine."
| lrgzdmn wrote:
| Anyone have any experience with SIPs (structural insulated
| panels)? The claim is that their use reduces waste and labor, but
| I'm not aware of any independent analysis to corroborate the
| claims.
| R0b0t1 wrote:
| I tried to price them out. They definitely save on labor but
| they are not particularly cheap. Depending on area your codes
| may not permit them and/or your local PEs may not want to sign
| off on them, even though they're fine. (This usually comes
| about by the local codes only assuming a finite set of valid
| structures, and some structure you wish to build not neatly
| fitting into those classifications.)
|
| They _could_ nebulously reduce "waste" but with how much more
| you're paying for them, it seems economically unviable to use
| them. In the sense that money is a signal, the waste is still
| there, you're just not seeing it and being put at an economic
| disadvantage for paying more.
| twothamendment wrote:
| I worked with them twice and loved it. But three times I've
| built my own house and passed them over.
|
| By my math, it makes sense to spend on a really good envelope
| like SIPs or a very efficient HVAC like ground source heat
| pumps - but buying the best of both is only for bragging rights
| and never pays off. Pick one or the other to go all out on and
| your bills won't be that much different if the other is just
| above average.
|
| The downside of spending extra on anything that isn't seen by
| the buyer is that they done want to pay extra for it. To bring
| it back around to SIPs, if two similar houses are for sale,
| nobody picks the more expensive one because it has SIPs. (ok,
| not nobody, maybe I would)
| kingsuper20 wrote:
| Great article.
|
| It would be interesting to compare the US to Japan and Japan's
| tendency to favor new construction (plus the differences in
| features and styles).
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > It would be interesting to compare the US to Japan and
| Japan's tendency to favor new construction
|
| You make it sound like these are opposing views but doesn't the
| US also heavily favour new construction?
|
| In the US and Japan I understand that a new build is seen as
| attractive and the best option for people with money to do it?
|
| If you want a real contrast, in the UK new build is seen as the
| worst option, for people without any money. People with money
| in the UK buy old houses. The older the better. I would
| literally never buy a new-build in the UK unless I had no other
| option whatsoever. I'm saving up to upgrade to an older house
| here.
| dimitrios1 wrote:
| > but doesn't the US also heavily favour new construction?
|
| I don't know if my view reflects the majority, but around
| where I am from, older and even historic homes are the crown
| jewels because they were built before the race to the bottom
| occured in construction -- namely cheaper, thinner walls,
| smaller usable space, etc. Older homes are built with old
| growth lumber, and often come with thicker plaster walls and
| better layouts.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > I don't know if my view reflects the majority
|
| It doesn't. For example this article expressing surprise:
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-26/previous
| l...
|
| Even the term 'previously owned' for a house is baffling to
| UK ears. Of course a house is previously owned. Why would
| you be building your own?
| jjeaff wrote:
| I have never seen a home listed as previously owned. In
| the US, homes are by default assumed "previously owned"
| unless specifically advertised as new. And only the very
| well off tend to demo and build fresh. Most people will
| remodel and add in to existing structures.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > I have never seen a home listed as previously owned.
|
| Ok but Bloomberg have.
| redtexture wrote:
| And older structures have much less insulation, compared to
| the present building code, as put forth in the so called
| International (actually US) Residential Building Code,
| adopted by most states.
|
| Energy use for heating and cooling is typically much higher
| in older buildings, over a lifetime of decades.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| I don't know about building codes, but I know a 1900
| house built from foot-thick stone is better insulating
| that anything we build today.
| Pxtl wrote:
| I have never seen a building from that era with foot-
| thick stone, you have to go back further for that here in
| Canada.
|
| The century homes here in southern Ontario are double-
| wall brick with beefy 2x4 framing within the interior
| wall, then lath and plaster, and no insulation.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| My 1930s UK house is foot-thick stone and brick on all
| walls, even internal. It doesn't have insulation except
| in the attic because it's one absolutely massive heat-
| sink mass - by the time it's warmed up from the summer
| it's already autumn and then it starts emitting the heat
| usefully instead.
|
| That's the way to build, in my opinion.
| earleybird wrote:
| Thermal mass as a tool is so very under utilized. When
| it's considered, it's often only on a 24hr cycle. As you
| point out, the 365 day cycle may be even more important.
| For a modern take (with for realz engineers and
| measurements even) have a look at Drake Landing community
| in southern Alberta. https://www.dlsc.ca/
|
| edit: They've discontinued the 'Current Conditions' part
| of their website but I followed it with some regularity
| in the early years
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| No. Nimbys have been in control for decades and only starting
| to lose their grip. In our city most folks are trapped in
| shitbox two story apartments from the sixties, that are now
| being renovated into luxury-light because supply is so highly
| constrained.
|
| Older mostly exists on the east coast with a few exceptions.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > shitbox two story apartments from the sixties
|
| Literally not sure if you consider these old or new-builds
| for the purpose of this conversation?
|
| I'd call anything post 1950 'new-build'.
| germinalphrase wrote:
| I've read that build quality in Japan is significantly lower
| due to the depreciating nature of houses as an asset and the
| bias toward building new.
| xivzgrev wrote:
| Seems like it's a self-reinforcing cycle: houses are built
| lower quality, people thus don't value older houses, so
| builders build lower quality to lower "new" cost
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/nov/16/japan-
| reusabl...
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| I admire the Japanese presence for building new because it
| means that the owners build the house they want rather than
| build for what the imaginary buyer 20 years in the future
| would want. So many people here in the states have nonsense
| houses for their family situation because their eye is
| incessantly on resale appreciation value.
| jbay808 wrote:
| With few exceptions, houses are a depreciating asset just
| about everywhere; it's only land that appreciates. Japan is
| no different except that the depreciation rate of the house
| may be somewhat faster, and appreciation of the land
| significantly slower than in other countries.
| greedo wrote:
| I'm not sure this is accurate. I purchased my house in
| 2004, and it's currently valued at $349K (purchase price
| $199K). The lot itself sold for $40K in 2003.
|
| Looking at available lots in my neighborhood, they average
| about $70K for my house size. So that means my house itself
| is valued at $280K.
|
| So yes, the land has appreciated by $30K (over 18 years),
| but the house itself has appreciated $120K in the same
| timeframe. The land appreciated at roughly 3% per annum,
| while the house appreciated at roughly the same rate.
|
| Of course this doesn't include any improvements, or
| maintenance costs associated with the house.
| ianmiers wrote:
| From what I've seen in residential Tokyo, houses are usually
| one offs built when the owner buys the land. And look, at least
| superficially, to be similar construction methods to American
| construction rather than European: i.e. wood framing as opposed
| to masonry/concrete.
|
| Maybe some of it is prefab, but given the narrowness of roads,
| I wonder.
| coryrc wrote:
| You are correct. The SFHs in Tokyo are usually built roughly
| similar to stick-built (slightly post-and-beam, but walls are
| load-bearing). Wood can be precut to length, but they are
| constructed on-site.
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