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Comment by fr0sty | Hacker News Reader

Some home exteriors are made with brick or concrete blocks but a large number (I can't quote a percentage) of American homes are built entirely from lumber. Current construction usually involves sheathing the outside of the house with plywood sheets and covering the sheets with vinyl siding. Interior walls are generally covered in drywall (also called "sheetrock" or gypsum board)

Where are you from and what are homes built with there?

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Most family homes I know in Germany are plastered brick houses†. Both exterior as well as interior walls are constructed using (different kinds of) bricks.

Wooden constructions are definitely very rare and more a fashion thing than anything else – definitely not a default choice.

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† With those bricks: http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Datei:Lochziegel.j...

I'm from Belgium, I don't know any house that doesn't use bricks/cement/other form of stone material. Maybe sometimes something softer on interior walls, but even there it's mostly stone.

I assume we don't go for the easier-to-rebuild because we don't have any strong types of nature force affecting us. There's no earthquakes, tropical storms, tornados etc here. Our summers are "cool" (going over 30C is pretty rare), our winters are "warm" (5 cm snow already feels like a lot to me). In short, we have a pretty moderate climate.

Edit: Pretty much the same as ugh[1] said in the other comment.

1: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3324587

I've often wondered about the reasons for differences in home construction methods.

Do you have a lot of available forests? We have millions of acres of timber available and that makes framing houses with wood much cheaper. Especially when you consider how much airspace/insulation modern houses have.

In California, earthquakes are the issue. Brick buildings use to be common, but they don't hold up very well in earthquakes. I ma guessing the cost of supplies also play a role.

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