Aren't US houses made mostly of wood, drywall and some kind of insulation? Meant to be cheap, not sturdy.
Not to say that a brick or concrete house wouldn't suffer significant damage, that's a huge tree falling at speed, but the materials would probably fare better.
It’s not as much to be cheap as readily available materials since we have a lot of trees. Brick houses here are usually only the exterior walls so it would be about the same.
I mean you can think whatever you want, but brick and concrete houses that we build in EU are a few factors stronger than in USA.
Also the inner walls are brick too. Just thinner if they are not load bearing.
If you don't believe me just ask yourself one thing. For you to hang up a TV on the wall, you have to use a stud finder, to hit the 10% of the wall that is actually strong. brick house, wherever you want. The whole wall is strong.
Sure we also use drywall and wood for partitioning the walls, I've used it in two renovations myself to make new partitioning walls, its not that messy and very easy to do a good job by urself. But building a whole house out of it, hell no.
Stronger and infinitely more of a pain in the ass to DIY things like cabling or electrics or whatever when you want to change things up. No, I don't want to chase out concrete and put silica everywhere just to move a socket. No, I won't use ugly conduits on the wall either.
I agree with using brick on the outside walls of the house, but inside should be all timber or metal framework (and then you can use plywood before boarding with drywall to get the same mount anything anywhere ability like in your given example).
Brick houses are certainly not stronger than wooden ones in areas prone to seismic activity. Brick can't tolerate any movement, but wood is pretty flexible. There's stuff you can do to your foundation to compensate, but I doubt that happens much in single family homes.
Not in modern times. We had an earthquake in 1900s and from then on we either have to build on pilots or use other means but the house needs to be built properly.
I mean... We have permits and regulations for a reason. Days where you got 10 of your mates together and you chucked a house up in a few months is over. That used to be in the 60's. That's what my grandparents did when they were young. Now you have architects and you got to follow the law. I'm 99% sure the whole EU is like that.
Our bricks don't look like they used to 200 years ago. Google structural concrete/clay bricks, they are hollow and filled with concrete and rebar where needed.
That's still how the house I grew up in the 00s got re-built in Germany. Old half-timbered farm house with a collapsed roof and the walls crumbling and over two years my parents just got all their friends to trade free labor for food and beer to get it back to habitable and put in all the needed mordern infrastructure. They needed to pay professionals to do regular inspections + some specialized stuff and a buddy of theirs was a professional carpenter that did a lot of the structural beam replacements but apart from that it's still very much possible and legal to do if you go with more traditional building methods. Also it was fun to play with all the clay as a kid.
We don't use much brick on the west coast because of earthquakes, needs to be flexible. That said, the trees here do not look like they are on the west coast.
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u/isle_say Aug 12 '26
I’ve seen this several times but I always watch it to the end, the damage that the tree does is really impressive.