I'm writing this from a perfectly insulated 200 years old stone house. We've got access to a wide array of insulation technology in Europe, often in the form of panels that can be used to renovate an older building. And you can just blast insulation on the bottom part of a roof, which costs a penny and takes care of a most of your thermal dissipation. Plus insulation is getting subsidized when the government wants to save energy.

>"Solid" sounds like a big waste of money to me.

Paying for a paper house sounds like a scam to me.

"Solid" houses are "immutable", and "paper" houses are "mutable".

I recently redid some plumbing in my "paper" house. It was real easy: shut off the water, cut some dry wall, make the fix, put some drywall back in, plaster, and paint.

How would this work in a solid house? Do I need to jackhammer through stone and then mix concrete to seal it back up when I'm done?

I've got copper tubing running along the bottom of the walls and going through inner walls and flooring. I can't think of anything going through the outer walls. We've got an antenna cable routed through a window frame.

I see we can have all kinds of analogies; I guess habits play a big role here. Different places in USA have different house styles - it's a big country.

Look, you're emotionally attached to the kind of house construction you grew up in as a kid. I can get that.

But do you realize how freezing it gets in the northeast USA here? When it's -10°C or -20°C, I don't care how insulated your roof is, your walls matter a ton. Stone makes zero sense.

And even suppose you wanted a house made out of stone. It would just so much more expensive to build it's crazy. People don't have the money for it.

There's zero "scam" here. Our houses are not "paper". You do realize we're not building houses out of plywood sheets, right? That we use strong wooden beams that can be covered in whatever siding material you want?

And that wooden houses aren't a "new cheap" thing -- I had friends in high school who lived in 150-year-old wooden houses. They're wonderful and charming, full of history.

Seriously. I do not understand this prejudice at all. Where does it come from?

Like, do you see news photos of destruction of trailer parks in hurricanes and blindly assume that's what happens to our houses (totally different thing) with a slight gust of wind? Because that's seriously the only thing I can guess here.

Well, we do come from societies where having a house made of stone meant it wouldn't entirely burn in the next war.

>Look, you're emotionally attached to the kind of house construction you grew up in as a kid. I can get that.

This isn't some misplaced nostalgia for archaic traditions. It's how everybody lives on my fucking continent.

>But do you realize how freezing it gets in the northeast USA here? When it's -10°C or -20°C, I don't care how insulated your roof is, your walls matter a ton. Stone makes zero sense.

I honestly couldn't tell how right or wrong you are. On one hand the countries I know that reach those temperatures do like wooden houses, on the other hand they have an overabundance of timber. In any case it's entirely irrelevant to the weather in most of the US, where they still build like that.

>And even suppose you wanted a house made out of stone. It would just so much more expensive to build it's crazy. People don't have the money for it.

Our cheap default building material is concrete blocks. But stone is still an option.

>And that wooden houses aren't a "new cheap" thing -- I had friends in high school who lived in 150-year-old wooden houses. They're wonderful and charming, full of history.

I have a 700 year old house round the corner. I don't know of any wooden building in the area older than the late 1600s. It's just not made to last.

>Where does it come from?

France.

>Like, do you see news photos of destruction of trailer parks in hurricanes and blindly assume that's what happens to our houses (totally different thing) with a slight gust of wind? Because that's seriously the only thing I can guess here.

Well, everybody's seen those images of houses torn by tornadoes, or rotting from flooding, or burned to a crisp, or just crumbling after a few decades of neglect.

I'm looking into buying at the moment, and I've got my eyes on a few houses. All traditional houses made out of thick granite as we do here. The idea that someone would take on a debt that possibly spans decades over something that's not literally rock-solid is mind-boggling to me.

So, yeah, it might be entirely cultural. But that's still one thing on which I'll never give an inch.

Great. That was my original point. That housing construction depends on local considerations.

So why don't you stop judging the housing where I live? You've insultingly called our houses "paper" and a "scam". And now you're swearing.

I'm not judging housing in your country, but you're judging mine. I'm not asking you to "give an inch" on where you want to live, but you're the one saying Americans are making bad decisions in how they build.

Why don't you show a little empathy and stop?

Seriously, why all this judgment?

Oh hey, like America.

Then why is wood more isolating than stone? Have you ever visited a medieval castle in the heat of summer? I guarantee that the thick stone walls offer more insulation than any modern home I've ever visited. Of course, we don't make walls that thick, but the material is not at issue.

Brick/stone/adobe are not insulators. They have substantial thermal mass, which means that they act to stabilize temperature. Put differently, they create a phase delay between exterior and interior temperatures changes.

The problem with this model is that it works in both ways if you live in a climate (like much of the USA) with substantial swings in typical daily temperatures between seasons.

The same massively thick stone wall that keeps the medieval castle cool in the heat of summer is also chilled to well below freezing by the deep cold of winter, and turns the castle (or whatever) into an icebox.

This is why sensible construction involves both thermal mass (stone/brick/adobe) and insulation. The former helps stabilize temperature, the latter prevents substantial gradients between the structure and the interior (or exterior) from causing major energy flow.

It's not that wood is super-insulating (though it's certainly better than stone). It's that wooden beams are spread far apart, and the space between them can be chock-full of insulation.

And as another commenter pointed out, the main reason isn't summertime insulation -- it's wintertime insulation. Stone is freezing. When it's -20°C out, insulation in between wooden beams makes all the difference.

Concrete blocks filled with insulation still just have way too much concrete to transmit the cold directly from outside to inside.

Aerated concrete for walls is a very awesome idea from Europe, but it’s not structural and by the time you build the structure for a typical two storey I’d bet that stick framing would be cheaper.

Euros typically put a much higher ratio of their income into housing and are willing to spend more. Same for Japan, and they build very good houses, but then tear them down after a couple of generations.

It's my experience that our American housing/apartment market is obsessed with pictures and numbers. Square footage. Dazzling photos. Checklists of amenities.

And this has been the source of much misery for me. For years I have hunted for somewhere to live with even a modicum of soundproofing. I've tried older duplex buildings with deep basements that are now illegal for fire escape reasons, higher end apartments, standalone houses, ...

Nobody advertises based on "soundproofing", with one exception that was ultimately a lie. Nobody advertises based on air system quality.

It's like we have completely forgotten that we have any senses other than sight.

The very opposite. A thin layer of plywood is a terrible insulator. Bricks are very good.

Wooden houses have wooden frames, with the wooden beams spread out, so that the space between them is chock-full of insulation.

This insulation is far, far, far superior than brick/stone can ever be. Brick is a terrible insulator. That's just a fact.

For thermal protection you can add the same insulation as for the wooden frame.

How those stone houses in New England fare during the year, are they that obsolete in terms of insulation?

A wood-frame house with the framing elements filled with appropriate thicknesses of insulation is a very, very much better insulated structure than one made (only) of brick.

It seems this fetish is spreading. My family is from a fairly small island in the Mediterranean where all the houses are constructed of solid reinforced concrete and foreigners who are buying property for vacation homes have been putting up little timber boxes which are the subject of local gossip.

brick walls have good downward (and in-line lateral) force resistance and suck at every other direction and torsion. tornado forces are multi-directional. wood frame walls are strapped down to the foundation in earthquake/tornado zones. plywood acts against (some) lateral and torsional forces.

plus, flying bricks are more dangerous to squishy humans.

In either case, building a home out of stone would do very little to stop, say, a refrigerator picked up by the tornado moving at 200 mph. Nor will it stop the house from pressurizing and blowing the roof off, stone or no stone. I mean, it could, if the walls were a foot thick each and there were no windows.

As a result, most Americans in the Tornado Alley (who can afford it) have a basement that has stone walls, and just accept the small probability that they lose almost all of their home.