USA Vs British Building Style

[Robson Valley]

The major difference for us, living in Taiga, is the availability of building materials.
We have no clay for brick. Period. This place is post-glacial, maybe 8,000 years.
Glacial debris, sand and rocky mountains. Nothing at all easily worked for construction.

However, we have forest, many thousands of square miles of wild forest. Wood.
To us, wood is a very cheap and useful building material (to 6 storeys).
Carpenter ants are a rare problem, termites are not a Canadian insect.

Add up the area of the UK with the area of New Zealand and the area of Japan.
The Canadian province of British Columbia is bigger than that and mostly forest.
Wood is exported from BC across Canada and the world.

My home is typical wood stick construction, 30' x 40', (1975) with an asphalt shingle roof (2012).
The new shingles should take a 100kph wind load without failure.
Shade air temperatures will swing from -35C up to +45C. Insulation takes care of much of that.
A couple of grape vines add summer shade to the afternoon/west side of the house.

My house is weatherproof with a specific fresh air intake for the central heating.
There are 3 separate power vent exhaust stacks to get rid of excess humidity and kitchen smoke.
My full sized basement is concrete walls lined and insulated like the upstairs.
So downstairs is warm and comfortable for additional living, kitchen, laundry and large work shop space.
The 200A electrical service is entirely adequate.

I lived in brick houses for 4 years in Melbourne, Australia. Miserable in bad weather, open to the gales of rain.
Had I stayed, I can imagine refitting the inside of the shell for weatherproofing and comfort.

 

[demographic]

One of the basics of moisture control in cold or cool climates is that there should always be a slightly lower pressure inside compared to outside. Water vapour (gas!) goes towards lower partial pressure which in practice means from warm to cold. (In Dubai I remember slightly wondering when the vapour barrier was on the outside of the wall but after some thinking it was apparent that the outside is almost always warmer.)

That is a very good point, the UK is mostly a cold climate where the inside is heated so the vapour barrier goes on the inside of the insulation and a breathable membrane on the outside.

In a hot climate where aircon keeps the building cool its the other way round.

 

[demographic]

Personally I'm very interested in SIPS panel construction. Its strong, can even be used in earthquake zones, very easy to seal up and keep warm, fast to build and cheap.
It can be clad with timber, stone, brick whatever so can take on whatever look an area code requires.

 

[TeeDee]

As an aside, google for some documentary films from the 60's, about an archetect called Walter Segal.
He came up with a building method, initially just for his own temporary house (whylst he was having a conventional house built), but it caught on.
It was basically a stick and bean structure, free standing on foundation pads. But the main feature was, it used standard material sizes throughout.

I do remember that concept but forgot the guys name - thank you.

 

[Old Bones]

Don't forget that the UK has been through it's timber frame building period and moved on (I live in a Cruck framed barn - it's hard to keep the draughts out!).

As someone else pointed out, what tends to get used are local materials, until cost/fashion etc starts to kick in. The UK started to have pressure on larger timbers due to pressures on forestry back during the medieval period (hence the slight changes to roof construction techniques), and when naval construction started to become a priority for timber production from the 18th century onwards, that got more acute. The Royal Navy was importing masts from both the Baltic and the then American colonies. Basically, wood got more pricey. Add to that the risks of fire (whole towns got burnt down in the 17th and 18th century, such as Wareham), and subsequent legislation to minimise risk meant more brick buildings, plus the usual stone, flint, cob, etc. Some of that brick was imported from the Netherlands.

And when the canals and railways came along, brick and slat became much more affordable to ship and use, brick became standard. In some 19th century parts of London, the clay for the bricks was dug out of the ground the buildings were then constructed on.

In the US, by contrast, there was effectively limitless amounts of timber, and it was cheaper to source than stone or brick in many areas (although depending where you were and what you could afford or used to , you might use adobe, stone , etc). So you would use perhaps brick or stone for the foundations and fireplace/chimney (or sometimes not even that) and then timber for the rest. Relatively fast to build, and in the 19th and 20th centuries, you could order a whole house from Sears Roebuck in kit form, shipped by rail, to be set up somewhere in the West.

On the other hand, bricks started to be fired from the early 17th century in the US, and there were imported bricks as well. In lots of US cities, you get brownstones, which in theory means stone built houses, but often are stone facaded, with a brick construction.

We can build timber houses in the UK, and do. But they are less popular, or perhaps perceived by the market to be less popular. Builders tend to build what they know, and what can sell. System built houses make a lot of sense, but looking at homes going up near me at the moment, even the style is a vaguely traditional pseudo Victorian design. So why would they radically change design and materials?

 

[santaman2000]

.....Most new houses over here have an inner core of wood and an outer skin of brick, or other non wood type coatings, and this is manly due to lowering the cost of the build, and speeding up the completion, many new homes have sheet timber on the floor rather than the traditional floorboards, time will only tell whether they will last as long as the older traditionally built homes.

Maybe time will tell. Personally I doubt they’ll last as well as your really old stone buildings. That said I expect they’ll last structurally longer than they will functionally. That’s what I meant by my earlier comment that we tend to tear houses down and start over after a few decades: after about 30 to 50 years the design (even down to the floor plans) begins to seem obsolete.

 

[Fadcode]

The houses over here get smaller and smaller and built down to a cost rather than up to a quality, Our council Houses used to be built to the Parker Harris standard which defines the size and quality of the houses, this fell to the wayside after the "Right to Buy Scheme" introduced by the Conservative Govt under Margaret Thatcher, very rare for Social Council Houses to be built now, as it's not economic to do it, as the tenants would still have the right to buy, leading to a loss by the Councils and a hefty rise in rates to cover the losses.
Now we see Housing Estates getting built everywhere even on flood plains, and other inappropriate sites, and the standards of the houses built is not very good..

 

[santaman2000]

Ours are getting bigger generally. At least that was the trend until about a decade ago. Then it looked like it might have peaked but I’m not sure if the pause was permanent. I live in a smaller home (just over 1016 square feet) but the average is around 1400 to 2300 In this area. However many are over 3000.

 

[TeeDee]

Ours are getting bigger generally. At least that was the trend until about a decade ago. Then it looked like it might have peaked but I’m not sure if the pause was permanent. I live in a smaller home (just over 1016 square feet) but the average is around 1400 to 2300 In this area. However many are over 3000.

And correct me if I'm wrong - the norm is a long term mortage 25-30 years at a fixed rate throughout the term of that mortgage? and that mortgage is assigned to the property or the person.

 

[santaman2000]

And correct me if I'm wrong - the norm is a long term mortage 25-30 years at a fixed rate throughout the term of that mortgage? and that mortgage is assigned to the property or the person.

Yes a fixed rate of 25-30 years is normal although variable rate financing exists.

As for assignment, both actually. And neither. If you sell the house (or any real property) before a mortgage is paid off there are two options:
1) The buyer (or the buyers lender) pays off the remainder of the mortgage in cash and gives you the remainder of the yours and his agreed upon price (your equity) In this case you would consider the mortgage to have been personally assigned.
-or-
2) The buyer pays you your equity directly and assumes the remainder of your loan. In this case you might consider the mortgage to have been assigned to the property.

Niether way is set in stone and you and your buyer can proceed as you wish presuming the buyer meets a few requirements: a) his credit rating is acceptable by your mortgage company, and b) he meets any preconditions you had to meet to get the original loan (for example my mortgage was guaranteed by the Veterans Administration as a benefit of military service. Any buyer assuming that mortgage would have to have also been an eligible veteran)

If you default on the loan you can lose the property (it takes a long term of default before the mortgage company can actually take possession in most states—-my room mate defaulted on hers and it took two years before they could evict her and another two years before they had free title to resell it) Yet your credit remains scarred until you repay the remainder of the loan. That said, the new buyers have an unencumbered title apart from their own mortgage.

Current interest rate on new mortgages is around 2% to 3.5% Median home prices in Crestview are around $180k to $230k


edited to correct spelling and typos