4 ms·

Possibly the difference he's noting is using wooden studs vs. metal studs? which definitely feel more hollow.

• chrisseaton 10y ago
  No, literally all the internal walls in my house are built from two solid layers of red bricks. There's no wood or metal involved. This is normal in most of the west outside America.
  • nol13 10y ago
    Oh, ya not sure if I've ever even seen that. I live in an old (by American standards) 1950's apartment building with plaster walls, but pretty sure still hollow underneath. Seems like that would make it harder to frame a new subdivision in under a week.
    • chrisseaton 10y ago
      Yes you can't slice-and-dice it like I'm sure you can wood. But they last forever. Houses here are routinely hundreds of years old where in the US the approach seems to be to knock down the wooden houses and build them again before they get that old.
      • dpark 10y ago
        > But they last forever. At least until the next earthquake, which is a real possibility in much of the US. Light frame houses survive earthquakes pretty well. The brick chimneys on them don't. > Houses here are routinely hundreds of years old where in the US the approach seems to be to knock down the wooden houses and build them again before they get that old. Well, yes and no. The US isn't that old. There weren't a lot of homes here hundreds of years ago so obviously there aren't a lot of 200-year old homes now. But yes, there's also a fair bit of demolishing of 50-year old homes.
        • crooked-v 10y ago
          I live in a four-story condo building that's about 100 years old and entirely wood-framed, all the way down to massive wood beams in the basement that anchor the entire place to the foundation. There's been some moderate renovations of exterior walls because of water damage before, but it's worth the hassles of that kind of thing to know that if an earthquake comes along the building will ride it out without any serious damage.
          • dpark 10y ago
            > There's been some moderate renovations of exterior walls because of water damage before Yeah, I don't understand the comments in this thread that talk about water damage. Do people in Europe just not bother maintaining their roofs? You can get hidden water damage from a leak into a hollow wall, but it's really not that common. Typically there's visible water staining and severe damage only comes from willfully ignoring that signs.
      • TheCoelacanth 10y ago
        I know plenty of people with houses over 100 years old in the US, so it's not like the houses aren't lasting that long. Naturally, it's not as large of a portion of the houses as in the UK because the US's population has more than 200% in the past 100 years while the UK's only went up by 50%, so the US needed to do a lot more construction since then.
  • pnutjam 10y ago
    Brick is very dangerous in an earthquake.
    • gozur88 10y ago
      This. You wouldn't catch me in a brick house in Northern California.
      • Turing_Machine 10y ago
        Or even in the midwest. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Madrid_Seismic_Zone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Madrid_Seismic_Zone It's going to be an ugly, ugly thing if another major quake hits there. The last time the region was sparsely populated. Now there are cities all over the place and and the seismic codes are far more lax than they are in California (if said codes even exist).