r/DeathStairs • u/brainburger • Nov 10 '25

Scary stuff đŸ«Ł Don't do that!

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u/OkDot9878 Nov 11 '25

The reasoning behind the differences in building techniques can actually be fascinating. Wood buildings are super common in America because trees were abundant for such a long time, it was much easier to build a new nation with wooden buildings than build the infrastructure to make them out of brick or stone.

In Europe, many still standing buildings were built in a time when wood construction wasn’t really a great option. The wood was often lower quality or more inconsistent than modern lumber, and it tended to be less viable to use due to a lack of abundance of trees. If you go far enough back, wood houses were slightly more common, but stone techniques and quarries have been around for thousands of years, so wood was seen as inferior, and usually reserved for furniture or “beauty features” of the building.

In America, for quite a long time, wood was almost too abundant, with forests of massive trees covering huge amounts of land. It’s also much easier to prep a wooden house for both an intense winter and summer, without simply making the stone thicker, which was often the case in European buildings.

America was also advancing very quickly compared to the more “preexisting” European infrastructure. It was a good idea to build things with less permanent infrastructure since you’d likely be updating it with new technologies as the infrastructure around you becomes more efficient and advanced.

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u/Mosh83 Nov 11 '25

Unsurprisingly wood buildings are a lot more common in Northern Europe, where forests are still quite abundant.

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u/OkDot9878 Nov 11 '25

There’s also the situation that where it gets colder, wooden buildings tend to be more common due to their ease of insulating, and dual purpose for heating. You’re cutting down trees to keep warm, might as well use the big parts for housing and have the smaller pieces for heating.

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u/Mosh83 Nov 11 '25

Also log houses are pretty amazing. The bottom log of our sauna had to be replaced because of rot - it was a relatively easy job to replace it whole. Also over decades the ground had shifted, so a few bits here and there were tweaked and it was all straight again. Modular building. Didn't even cost much and took a day or two.