My wife and I have entertained the idea of a bigger house for quite some time.
Well, that boat has sailed. Building has pretty much become unaffordable for us, unless we'd move way out to the country side. And I mean WAY out - we would spend a lot more time every day driving everywhere). We'd also have to build a rather modestly-sized home to fit it into our budget.
The thing is, the only reason we've started thinking about a new house in the first place is that - with a growing family - our current home is starting to feel a bit tight.
The only alternative would be to buy an older house and renovate it. That would possibly keep us in the general area, but financially it wouldn't be viable either. Houses here are usually priced so that if you were to get them to a modern standard, you would end up having spent the same amount of money as if you built a completely new home. Except that the old one will be, at its core, still an old house.
> Except that the old one will be, at its core, still an old house
Is this a good thing or a bad thing?
I like the idea of the core of my house being true 2x4s made of hardwood, instead of scam “2x4s” where they say it’s because of their sawblades but I’d say it’s because the mills squeeze too many “2x4s” out of a log.
Why spend more for a hardwood when its not needed in framing?
And I don't think dimensional lumber is really a scam? You can go to a mill and buy rough cut wood still. Its cheaper but it also has its own possible drawbacks, you might need to dry it out, the boards will not have exact sizing like dimensional lumber and depending on your building code and the mill you buy from, you may need to get it graded and stamped for inspections. Ignoring recent price spikes, wood and framing are only a small part of the cost to build.
So my house is from the 1950s built in soviet times from whatever they got their hands on. It's in a quiet seaside inner suburb of a baltic capital.
The house is built from wooden railway sleepers arranged vertically, the whole outer wall are those beams next to each other. Structurally I guess much superior to any 2x4.
There was some insulation added in the 90s but it is still crap.
My choices here are:
1. spend a lot of money to redo insulation, change the windows change all the floors, completely redo heating and the result is still a smallish impractical and frankly ugly house inside and out.
2. tear the whole thing down, recycle the materials and build a truly modern, beautiful, practical, energy generating passivhaus. Will cost more, for sure.
3. sell the thing and try to find a similarly good plot and build on it.
No one uses hardwood 2x4 for framing houses. If they did it'd add, at minimum, six figures to your home cost with effectively no benefit. You can absolutely choose between grades of 2x4, however, and if you're working with a builder you can specify with them.
Nobody ever did. Hardwood is completely impractical to build a house with. You'd have to predrill a hole for every nail.
Also, nominal dimensions have always referred to the as-sawn size: planed size has always been smaller by the amount of planing since small-dimension stock began to be used 120-140 years ago. The only difference is that the actual (smaller) size varied widely between sawmills until the early 1960s, when the finished size was regulated.
In the USA, 2x4s were cut from old growth pine from southeastern Appalachia and railed all over. My home from the late 1800s was built with Southern Yellow Pine and I live in the Midwest. This is not technically a hardwood but in terms of density it is just as hard as most hardwoods because it has such tight rings (20-30 per inch).
Are you saying that if you remove the wall surface of an older house the studs would actually measure 2 inches by 4 inches and be made of something other than pine? How old of a house would have this type of framing?
Well, that boat has sailed. Building has pretty much become unaffordable for us, unless we'd move way out to the country side. And I mean WAY out - we would spend a lot more time every day driving everywhere). We'd also have to build a rather modestly-sized home to fit it into our budget.
The thing is, the only reason we've started thinking about a new house in the first place is that - with a growing family - our current home is starting to feel a bit tight.
The only alternative would be to buy an older house and renovate it. That would possibly keep us in the general area, but financially it wouldn't be viable either. Houses here are usually priced so that if you were to get them to a modern standard, you would end up having spent the same amount of money as if you built a completely new home. Except that the old one will be, at its core, still an old house.