If you're looking for a new house in the UK, then you're going to get ripped off. Poor quality construction, too many tiny rooms, no outside space, design deficiencies which mean the house is unlikely to last 30 years without major reconstruction, an insurance policy that's not worth the paper its written on, an emerging scandal in leasehold contracts.
Buy an old house, preferably a Victorian terraced house or a solidly constructed 1930s-1960s council house.
Also similar to American houses, they now are all built around wooden frames. That's cheap and easy (the frames are made in a factory and just screwed together on site), but in a wet and windy island it's a very bad idea. Any significant roofing leak which isn't fixed immediately will destroy the house, and helpfully these wooden framed houses are dressed in fake brick and plastic cladding which cover up evidence of leaks.
Having lived in American houses for about 30 years now, leaking isn't an issue if you have a good roof that is maintained. I live in the north, an even worse than rain we get lots of snow that leads to "ice dams" forming on roofs. Even with that we don't have problems with leaking.
Knowing family in N.E. where it rains, and snows quite a bit and remains damp for most of the year (ponds) the construction type doesn't seem to be deficient in that sense. They are however, not the same construction as older house from 1800s, early 1900s --but those too have their issues with very irregular construction. Things which would not be allowed today (narrow staircases, irregular architecture and of course, no accommodation for modern plumbing or electricity).
I've pondered where you even start today if you want to build an 1800's style "built to last" home that ignores cost, and focuses both on longevity and ease of maintenance.
With some modern design concepts (e.g. leaving plenty of plenum for unanticipated future cabling/plumbing needs) I think you could come up with a very pleasant place to live, just at probably quadruple the price.
Is anyone building stuff like this today? Or would this have to be some extremely custom stuff you need to research and act as a contractor managing a bunch of subcontractors?
Absolutely, if you have a good roof which is maintained, not the cheapest possible roof which goes unmaintained because naive buyers think that because it's a new house with an "insurance" policy they will never need to maintain anything.
The problem is use of softwood timber frames (because: cheap) in a very wet country, adding the cheapest possible roof, then cladding the whole lot so you cannot see any leaks or other damage happening. Then selling the resulting tiny flat to a first time buyer who doesn't know any better for an average of £232K (2016 figure). IoW a systematic failure at all stages.
> Also similar to American houses, they now are all built around wooden frames. That's cheap and easy (the frames are made in a factory and just screwed together on site), but in a wet and windy island it's a very bad idea. Any significant roofing leak which isn't fixed immediately will destroy the house, and helpfully these wooden framed houses are dressed in fake brick and plastic cladding which cover up evidence of leaks.
Nearly every one of these criticisms is a desirable feature of traditional Japanese architecture. Houses are assembled from standardized materials produced off-site and fitted together without nails (wood joinery). Many interior walls and some exterior walls are literally made of paper, in sliding wooden frames (exterior shoji almost always have sliding wooden covers that are deployed at night). Special attention is paid to the thatched or tiled roof.
Japan is a very wet place. In summer there are typhoons at least every week and it's miserably hot and humid. Traditional houses are perfectly adapted for this: when you need to you can slide open most of the walls and take advantage of every breeze. I believe that most of the wood is cedar, which is resistant to rot, and most of the structure is left visible (i.e. no plaster) so any problems are readily apparent.
Houses seem less adapted to winter, but people adapt by using deep baths, kotatsu, and quilted clothing to heat their bodies rather than the entire inside of the house.
Earthquakes are pretty common in Japan, one of the reason lighter materials are used. Traditional buildings are typically built on stone foundations. Structural posts are fitted with stone "feet" that are free to slide around on the foundation during earthquakes.
Japanese don't value permanence in architecture the way Europeans do -- even the Ise Jungu (shrine), a national monument, is rebuilt every N years -- yet in the area I lived (Nara prefecture) there were many traditional houses over a hundred years old. There is at least one wooden building at Horyuji (temple) that is ~1200 years old.
[Thanks to Dr. Lloyd Fulton for that class in traditional Japanese architecture at Waseda U. Miss you, sensei.]
I didn't know traditional houses over a hundred years old existed in this country. The sole exception that have witnessed are western style building in Hakodate, however they are anything but traditional.
More importantly, when you speak about these throwable houses, are you sure that is a "desirable feature"?
>Japanese don't value permanence in architecture the way Europeans do...
That may be a big part of the explanation. It's fairly common for Japanese people to have the existing house torn down and rebuilt when they buy a property.
Houses have been timber framed in the UK since the sixties. There is nothing wrong with timber frame houses, Bergen gets much more rain than most places in the UK and is still mostly timber houses. I've lived in a timber framed house clad in horizontal planks for the last thirties years in Norway (the house was built in 1952) and it's fine. Modern Norwegian houses are often made of kits of parts but that generally makes them better not worse.
It might be that the UK has more than its fair share of cowboy builders. It is not the building technique that is at fault but the execution of it.
The 1920s ex-council house I live in is built from two layers of brick separated by a cavity (with metal ties between the layers, which are themselves a problem because they rust). Unbelievably even the internal walls are also all two layers of brick. All I know is that labour must have been very cheap in 1920.
The outer cavity is designed to stop water from crossing from the outside to the interior.
There is a fashion for filling the cavity with insulating materials, but that leads to problems because it can draw water between the layers.
Bricks have very low r-value meaning that you pay a lot of money to heat/cool them. Bricks is a bad choice for construction anywhere where indoor climate control is an issue.
American construction is strong enough to last for a few hundred years if you maintain it. While it isn't passive house efficient it is efficient (and it isn't clear that a passive house is even possible in our climate - many of them make other compromises which means they rot out in a few years).
How can you know about r-values but not that every modern house built has cavity walls that can be/are insulated?[1]
Even hundred-year old houses can be insulated by DIY drylining. You'll lose about 10cm of floor space though. Sometimes there's even some government grants available for this[2]
I'm biased to US construction methods of course. Note that while bricks are themselves of a worse r-value than wood, but wood isn't actually a great r-value either.
Note that bricks are not a strong as wood under tension. They do well under compression, but that is not all the loads to account for. Bricks are used in cities and commercial construction primarily because they do not burn and so you can use them as a safety barrier.
Not usually concrete in a domestic house, but solid red brick or stone blocks for the internal walls yes. Hollow walls like a kind of wood and plaster tent seems just as ridiculous to me. Solid walls keep the house cool or warm and stop noise.
New construction (at least in the north central US) is minimum 2"x6" studs in the exterior walls filled with fiberglass insulation and pretty significant blown fiberglass insulation in the roof. Most of the noise going between interior rooms is a result of the use of cheap, hollow doors; usage of solid oak doors minimizes sound travel between rooms. Additional noise-damping insulation can be installed between rooms if desired that effectively eliminate all sound travel between rooms.
I'd speculate that a well-build modern wood-and-sheetrock house is probably more energy efficient and quieter than an early 20th-century double- or triple-brick house.
Also, wood-and-sheetrock is a lot easier/cheaper to replace than brick when a tornado comes along and knocks the house down, which is possible in 75% of the US.
There are significant areas of the US where I suspect it's actually illegal to build an all-brick house (as opposed to just quite expensive).
The UK is basically tectonically stable, which means those brick houses aren't likely to collapse into a multi-ton pile of bricks when the mortar crumbles or cracks in an earthquake. The same cannot be said of many areas in the USA, and it only takes one earthquake every few decades to drive that point home.
No, please no concrete for the walls. I have lived in an an apartment that had concrete walls in Bangalore and it's just terrible. Concrete amplifies both hot and cold weathers. So you are spending a ton of money on air-conditioning and heating as well. Admitted, in Bangalore you don't need heating but I can't imagine a concrete house in the northern hemisphere.
Like others have stated, solid bricks, stones or even clay bricks are a better alternative. You still need to use cement but that's alright.
The thermal mass in construction is like adding inductors and capacitors to a circuit. It has to be tuned to the local climate. The best you can do with thermal mass alone is an interior that is always the local mean temperature (like in a cave).
So in a thermal wall, you should match the rate at which heat conducts through the wall to the thickness of the wall, such that it takes about (12 + 24n) hours for heat applied to the exterior of the wall to radiate from the interior of the wall, and vice versa. You're trying to eliminate the daily temperature variation, so that the heating or cooling load will be more stable.
Adding phase-change materials to the concrete mix would help, but for the most part, the traditional building method in the region has been tuned by trial and error. If you build an adobe house in New Mexico, you make the walls from local materials, with the same thickness as the traditional homes. Or you get an engineer to do the thermal calculations.
Most houses built in the US just stick to the building code, which is generally good enough to accommodate local weather conditions without breaking out the calculators.
Right. Writing code to estimate the optimum thickness was one of our homework problems in modeling and simulation class, back in the day. I expect running that sim on a PC would be trivial today, but back then it took a significant amount of time on a fast SPARCstation.
(the basic idea was to model the wall as extremely thin slices so the heat transfer between slices can be approximated easily. How thin? You kept making them thinner until the model stabilized).
The wall thickness we derived was very close to the wall thickness traditionally used by the indigenous people of the area. What are the odds? :-)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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).
New houses in the UK are almost universally a joke(and I've been looking at some recently) - 4-5 bedroom homes with bedrooms so laughably small that they don't even fit a double size bed. So effectively, you take one room for the bedroom, one for a wardrobe, and one for a desk. Idiotic. And like others have mentioned - paper thin walls.
Buy an old house, preferably a Victorian terraced house or a solidly constructed 1930s-1960s council house.