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Some finish materials are much worse. Small (by modern standards) ordinary middle-class homes in, say, the 1950s, had the kind of interior and exterior doors, a

Some finish materials are much worse. Small (by modern standards) ordinary middle-class homes in, say, the 1950s, had the kind of interior and exterior doors, and baseboards/molding, that'd be considered luxury-tier today. Even big expensive McMansions usually don't have doors and molding that nice, now. The higher end might get the luxury-tier front door... maybe. But any back or side doors won't be that nice, and usually not the interior doors, either. Totally normal houses were still getting solid-wood molding and baseboards as a matter of course into the early 90s, while now it's almost unheard of unless you pay a huge premium for a custom job during construction. Very nice wood floors used to be more common, too. Very nice by modern standards, anyway—normal, then. "Very nice" back then would have been ultra-luxe now, like fancy patterns or parquet or something. Basically, decent wood has become incredibly expensive. Almost all our lumber sucks now, unless you pay crazy-high prices. So things like nice solid-wood doors are impractically expensive unless you salvage them (and then you have the problem of sizing and constructing framing for them, rather than for standard frame-included modern doors)

lotsofpulp 4y ago
But do any of those things yield utility for the end user, other than being able to say it is more expensive?
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  Much nicer-feeling, more durable & don't look as bad after light wear, more repairable, more modifiable without replacement. Far less need for various glues and solvents that are probably not great things to have out-gassing in your house. [EDIT] Oh and the solid doors sure seemed to do a much better job of sound-proofing than modern ones do.
gruez 4y ago
Could this be survivor bias at work? All the nice 1950 stuff you see are only around because they're nice enough to keep around. If they're junk they'd be replaced in a reno or something.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  Nah, it's pretty normal even in small-fairly-poor-town ~900 sqft houses that were absolutely not anything special at the time. You'll see whole neighborhoods built like that. Decent-or-better wood was just cheaper back then, and the labor to finish it was (relatively) way cheaper, too. All the houses would have these heavy, thick, solid wood doors that you don't see in new-build neighborhoods unless someone customized it or it's a very high-end neighborhood. Growing up, basically all trim & baseboards in early-90s-or-earlier houses was solid wood, even in poorer neighborhoods, though by then solid wood front and interior doors were on the way out as features of middle-class houses. These days, you might see solid wood in one or two public rooms as a kind of highlight feature in upper-end McMansions, but almost no-one finishes e.g. extra bedrooms with solid wood baseboards anymore. They used to be standard for the whole house—you almost never saw anything else.

lotsofpulp 4y ago

But do any of those things yield utility for the end user, other than being able to say it is more expensive?

yamtaddle 4y ago
Much nicer-feeling, more durable & don't look as bad after light wear, more repairable, more modifiable without replacement. Far less need for various glues and solvents that are probably not great things to have out-gassing in your house. [EDIT] Oh and the solid doors sure seemed to do a much better job of sound-proofing than modern ones do.

gruez 4y ago

Could this be survivor bias at work? All the nice 1950 stuff you see are only around because they're nice enough to keep around. If they're junk they'd be replaced in a reno or something.

yamtaddle 4y ago
Nah, it's pretty normal even in small-fairly-poor-town ~900 sqft houses that were absolutely not anything special at the time. You'll see whole neighborhoods built like that. Decent-or-better wood was just cheaper back then, and the labor to finish it was (relatively) way cheaper, too. All the houses would have these heavy, thick, solid wood doors that you don't see in new-build neighborhoods unless someone customized it or it's a very high-end neighborhood. Growing up, basically all trim & baseboards in early-90s-or-earlier houses was solid wood, even in poorer neighborhoods, though by then solid wood front and interior doors were on the way out as features of middle-class houses. These days, you might see solid wood in one or two public rooms as a kind of highlight feature in upper-end McMansions, but almost no-one finishes e.g. extra bedrooms with solid wood baseboards anymore. They used to be standard for the whole house—you almost never saw anything else.