Can you give an example of inferior material?
- Vinyl windows compared to old growth wood windows from 100 years ago.
- Vinyl siding compared to cedar shakes.
- Extremely poor wood quality in the lower end 2x4 and 2x6 lumber.
- Sheathing that's essentially cardboard in really cheap builds.
- Flooring is sad today in cheap to moderate homes.
Thing is there were really badly built homes 100 years ago and they just aren't standing any longer. We do get a but of selection bias when we compare old homes. The ones that are still standing were probably built well and of quality materials and have been taken care of.
You can build an awesome home today out of excellent materials like engineered wood, high quality OSB/ply/ZipSystem, and of course whatever you want to spend on flooring, siding, windows, etc.
Of course, there will always be different quality materials available at different prices.
But I would bet the lowest quality house with the lowest quality materials and build quality 100 years ago is much worse than the same today.
> Flooring is sad today in cheap to moderate homes.
I never understood this lament. It has never made a lick of difference to my quality of life if the hard flooring under me was tile/real wood/granite/LVT. Whether or not it is a heated floor is the only thing that has increased the utility I get from the floor.
Otherwise, the LVT I can buy at Costco gives me better utility than some fancy real wood floor. I can not give a shit about it, not spend a dime or second maintaining it, and fix it in 15 minutes. And you can change the whole look for much cheaper, and get it in whatever design/color you want.
I get it, everyone has different tastes and budgets, and values. to me, wood floors feel nice, they look nice, and they sound nice when walked on. Laminate flooring clicks and areas that get walked on just a bit more begin to wear out and begin to lose their printed finish.
> Yeah it's all going to look awful in about 2 years but you can just replace it with more cheap junk.
That is the difference, it does not. The higher quality (and even decent quality) LVT performs very well, and for a long time. Even hotels use it, and in my experience, for normal wear and tear around a house, anything Costco quality and up will not noticeably degrade. I am regularly in many tract built houses from 5 to 7 years ago, and the flooring does not look worn at all.
There probably is super low quality cheap LVT that does not have sufficient longevity, but my point is just because something is composite instead of “real”, or lightweight instead of heavy, does not mean it cannot do the job.
Cedar shakes are a fire hazard, and most people use cement board rather than vinyl.
You can't have everyone use virgin forest wood. And with that said especially in non load bearing walls why use your best wood, it's just a waste. You get far more strength by use of modern fastners and straps.
Until the sun or termite-treating the home degrades the vinyl.
I'll also assume you've never pulled the putty out of the old windows and had to redo them, because it is a lot of work.
- Old windows from 100 years ago were single pane. I grew up with them. My bedroom was freezing cold in the winter and roasting in the summer. And they couldn't seal so they leaked water which rotted out the window frame. Not exactly a great example of old homes lasting longer.
- Cedar shake is a fire hazard. Yeah, we don't build houses like that because a century ago entire towns would light up like a match. It was a regular occurrence.
- New constructions (At least mine was) built with 2x6, so it has a higher R rating and better soundproofing. My energy bills are a fraction of those for an older house.
- New homes are better sealed, and contain air tight vapor barriers. Water can't get in and rot the wood like with old homes. Yes, it's not old growth wood, but it will last longer. Better sealing, air filtration and HVAC will reduce your chance of getting lung cancer from air pollution.
- Modern high end LVP flooring is substantially more robust than hardwood. Dogs can't scratch it, you can drop a cast iron pan on it, it's waterproof. If you want to instead spend money on hardwood there's nothing stopping you, but LVP looks great and is easy to replace.
Yes but you can (and should) weatherstrip them. Fully integrated weather stripping and storm windows will solve the problems you're addressing. Yes still lower R-value but old homes are leaky and putting in modern windows won't save you much in these instances.
> New homes will hold up better a hundred years from now
Most won't. My home is over 100 years old and I'm 100% positive it will outlast 90% of modern construction put up today 100 years from now. I've seen my house gutted in many places and it's pristine. I've seen many 20 year old homes that are full of mold and rot.
> Cedar shake is a fire hazard.
Depends where you live. It looks great and there are millions of homes with it. At least where I live where there is a lot of spacing between homes and we don't have forest fires like out West.
> - New constructions (At least mine was) built with 2x6, so it has a higher R rating and better soundproofing. My energy bills are a fraction of those for an older house.
That's how I'd do a new build. But what does it have to do with sound proofing? I can use 5/8 drywall and use rock-wool or w/e between rooms if I want. It's what I've done when I remove plaster and lath walls. Agree about energy.
> New homes are better sealed, and contain air tight vapor barriers. Water can't get in and rot the wood like with old homes. Yes, it's not old growth wood, but it will last longer. Better sealing, air filtration and HVAC will reduce your chance of getting lung cancer from air pollution.
Might be. Hope the guy installing it cared enough not to install some flashing wrong or didn't forget to seal something. There's so much bad workmanship and a lot of today's better materials demand it's done very precisely. Saying that, a good contractor will inspect and test, but most won't. Old homes are still standing because water was/is kept away with larger eves (ever notice homes after water barriers came out stopped having large eves or any?) and by virtue of not having great insulation. They literally dry themselves out. God, the number of windows I've seen where the vapor barrier is installed/folded wrong or the flashing is wrong; or ZipSystem walls where the taped seals aren't quite right because of a weird angle.
> Better sealing, air filtration and HVAC will reduce your chance of getting lung cancer from air pollution
You can install HVAC with whatever filters you want in an old house. I've done it.
> Modern high end LVP flooring is substantially more robust than hardwood
I think it's appropriate in a basement room but I'd never consider having it in the rest of my home.
An old house in disrepair or what hasn't bene renovated is probably a pretty bad thing that isn't going to last long. But if you've put the money into it and renovated you have a home that's setup for another 100 years and simply has gobs of character and charm you'll never get in a new home. But that's all a value call.
One of the main problems with modern houses is that they go to shit very quickly if they're ever unoccupied for a while. They need heating and cooling (especially the dehumidifying effect of AC) or they'll require extensive repairs and renovation within a year or two. Saw tons of these when looking at houses after the '08 bust—some of the bigger banks let houses sit for a couple years without even trying to sell them, and they inevitably had major visible mold problems, and probably a lot more going on inside the walls.
It's the sealing differences that do it. Modern houses are built to be super-tightly-sealed, but that means they have (at least seasonal) moisture problems without an active HVAC system. Older houses were built to breathe. Modern materials also aren't built or installed with major seasonal temp swings in mind, so you'll get things like badly-cracking drywall seams, buckling trim, buckling floors, fucked-up doorframes, and so on, due to thermal expansion and contraction. Even intricate, tight woodwork in very-old houses was crafted to survive that kind of thing (it had to be).
Not that older houses don't get into trouble without maintenance, but it takes longer and serious problems pretty much require a roof or wall breach. Modern houses will fall apart while the roof and exterior walls are totally fine.
Frankly wooden windows are a personal pet peeve of mine. I have old (many decades) wooden windows in my house, and also new-ish wooden windows and plastic windows that were installed at the same time by the same company during a single renovation by the previous owner, so I can compare either old-new or new-new. If aliens landed and asked me "hey, we need to identify a few idiots among your species, can you give us the most reliable way to find one? Doesn't have to be broadly applicable, but does have to be a sure bet." I'd say "Look for people ordering wooden windows." I just utterly cannot comprehend why anyone would do it.
Wood windows that are clad in aluminum or fiberglass will last 50 years and perform.
Same for siding. Vinyl siding fades from the sun and warps and stops doing its job after a few years and now water is getting in.
There’s a reason only the cheapest construction uses these materials.
The wooden windows of the same age and roughly the same dimensions installed by the same company are all kinds of wonky; they slide poorly because of I guess gradual shape change and wear of the wood, and don't seal well. Also a minor installation defect caused the top of one of the windows to rot. Not a problem with plastic, if there's a defect just fix it, window is good as new. When the window guys told me I need to replace the window I just said while you're at it do you want to rip out all the other ones too an replace with plastic? :)
Vinyl warps more than twice as much as wood and 7 times glass and is very weak to resistance. On an extremely hot or cold day the temperature outside and inside are hugely different. This matters more in regions that see more extreme temperatures throughout the year.
Now it might be you live in a climate where the weather barely changes and it might be your windows are quite small. Smaller windows don’t suffer as much as larger windows like a 36x52. So I’ll grant environment matters. Even which direction they face will matter.
And yes there are different qualities of vinyl windows. But I’d put a lower quality aluminum/fiberglass clad wood window against the best vinyl every day.
And while there’s no accounting for taste, vinyl windows look awful.
Also just googling "vinyl window wrap" or deformation (I assume vinyl is what people typically call cheaper plastic?) I cannot find much of anything. On the other hand if you google for wooden windows or siding moisture/deformation/rot, you find plenty of advice and complaints alike. These physics seem to be reality defying, or they apply in some extreme conditions when comparing with the best possible wooden window...
And I tried to avoid bringing up taste, even though I wanted to, but I guess I have to bite now. That actually gives me additional disdain for wooden-window-buying - yep, they are still popular because a significant fraction of the population still thinks that e.g. craftsman houses with "nooks" and 4-to-7ft sloping ceiling on the 2nd floor are "timeless" and modern functional ones are "soulless boxes". I can only chalk it to misplaced nostalgia... I'm sorry, the Neolithic called, they want their mud huts back :P
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)
[EDIT] Oh and the solid doors sure seemed to do a much better job of sound-proofing than modern ones do.
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.
I also vosited quite a few apartments where they used thinner material and sound proofing is not exactly great.
We’re building more cheap crap, sure, but also a few rare, well-built buildings.
Here's a page showing some of those mail order catalogs: https://www.thoughtco.com/foursquare-house-plans-catalog-fav...
Looking from the basement up through to the framing, or from the second story down to the flooring, EVERYTHING was built from really thick timber. If you've walked around a modern unfinished project you can see nearly everything wood is made from fast growing wood or particles of wood just glued together. And that holds true even for "high-end" home projects (aka homes sold as high end because they have fancy kitchen appliances, not solid construction).