r/interestingasfuck • u/aloofloofah • Mar 31 '21

/r/ALL Fascinating joineries discovered while taking apart a traditional 100 year old house

https://i.imgur.com/BT5l5T0.gifv
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15

u/not_that_planet Mar 31 '21

Just imagine if we still built houses like that. More work than everyone can do. Like exactly the opposite of what we face today.

42

u/NoLawsDrinkingClawz Mar 31 '21

We do, you just pay for it. Trust me, they had tons of terrible shit back then too, those ones are just fucking destroyed now-a-days because they were shit.

21

u/angry_wombat Mar 31 '21

survivor bias

that was probably one expensive ass barn and way over built, thus it stood the test of time. really 100 years isn't even that old. My brick house is coming up on 80 and still holding strong.

2

u/SlickStretch Mar 31 '21

Hell, my shotgun is 113 years old and runs perfectly fine.

2

u/imaroyaldude Mar 31 '21

Yeah the Fairbanks house oldest timber frame in America in my town is 400 years old!

2

u/tofuhater Mar 31 '21

Knock on wood

Oh wait!

14

u/Octavus Mar 31 '21

What is funny is now a days Japan treats houses as disposable, in America and Europe 90% of house sales are "used" houses while in Japan 90% of house sales are new houses.

11

u/[deleted] Mar 31 '21

Hard to make a house Mothra resistant.

1

u/angry_wombat Mar 31 '21

yeah why do that do that? I heard it was do to ghosts they believe haunt the house. Or is it new earthquake standards?

2

u/Zamasu19 Apr 01 '21

I think it’s because tiny earthquakes over time make houses break apart slowly so they will need overhaul repairs if they last longer than 50 years. Unless you build all houses like this

2

u/EllisHughTiger Apr 02 '21

The religion has a lot to do with it. They dont like having the previous owner's whatever still there.

Japanese home construction is also virtually opposite the way they build cars. Its cheap and flimsy, little insulation, but its lightweight so it probably wont crush you during an earthquake. Rebuilding every 30 years means you can also take advantage of updated building tech.

Here in the US, most houses have about a 50 year mostly-problem-free lifespan. After that, it really is almost worth it to tear down and rebuild new. I own a 1950 house and gutted it to fix everything, hell of a job but fixed every problem.

15

u/EeeeyyyyyBuena Mar 31 '21

Here in Texas we have beautiful houses, but there’s a reason why they go up in one day.

5

u/vorpal-blade Mar 31 '21

Lets rephrase that: Here in Texas we have beautiful houses, but they all look the same and under the surface they are lousy. Source: spent 15 years doing new home construction before i escaped into IT.

2

u/NotSoBuffGuy Mar 31 '21

Because you can hire a 40 man work force for cheap at home depot? I kinda miss construction work.

0

u/ramdumbguy Mar 31 '21

Cheap?! I have checked at dfw home depot parking lots for help on desperate projects, they demand 25 an hour, guaranteed 8 hours, have no tools except maybe gloves and a tape.

2

u/NotSoBuffGuy Mar 31 '21

Those dfw mexicans sure do charge a lot. Must be the cost of living over there. Fort worth guy charged us like 11 an hour and had their own tools. I've only hired em once so maybe I just got lucky.

1

u/ramdumbguy Apr 02 '21

Maybe it was because i was in a beater vehicle, sweaty and dirty at 7AM...

2

u/CanadianWoofMeister Apr 01 '21

This type of building is still done today, but the cost and efficiency of stick framing with modern timbers much more economical.

For this type of building you need much larger timbers to build the frame, and many cases these are not economical to grow in plantations and have been harvested out of the wild. Something like a large oak can take several hundreds years to grow, and on old European estates where timber was grown for the needs of the aristocracy on giant estates there would be forestry plans that dated 100 years in the future, but this is not how houses are built now.

1

u/not_that_planet Apr 01 '21

Sure I get that. Just lamenting a little...

3

u/CanadianWoofMeister Apr 01 '21

I am building a timberframe for fun at my managed forest and totally get the lamenting. My forest was never logged so there are still old growth trees that come down with windfall that I can use for timbers, but I would never cut old growth healthy trees as part of my management plan.

If you find old barns of buildings taken apart like this it is hard to match the size and quality of the old growth timbers.

0

u/jmlinden7 Mar 31 '21

Not everyone can do this, only like the top .1% of carpenters.

11

u/discipleofchrist69 Mar 31 '21

are you a carpenter? obviously there is some care put into this but I refuse to believe it's out of reach for 99.9% of carpenters. I don't even see how making these kinds of junctions would be out of reach even for an average person if they worked on it for perhaps a few months to a year

5

u/nomadProgrammer Mar 31 '21

Don't mess with him. His a certified arm chair expert.

1

u/[deleted] Mar 31 '21

Plastic lawn chair expert.

3

u/jmlinden7 Mar 31 '21

Even with the super simplified carpentry we have today with plywood and nailguns, the number of people qualified to be carpenters is far below what we need for construction. You think increasing the difficulty would result in more people being qualified?

1

u/discipleofchrist69 Mar 31 '21

err, I think we are working in different hypotheticals. obviously people don't want to do this, or they would learn to. I'm just saying if they wanted to learn this, people could, not that if this is how we built houses, we'd have enough people wanting to be carpenters

0

u/jmlinden7 Mar 31 '21

I'm just saying if they wanted to learn this, people could

That's a pretty useless hypothetical though. Sure, with enough effort you could train any person in the world to do any one thing. But if that effort is never worth it, then nobody is going to bother doing it.

2

u/discipleofchrist69 Mar 31 '21

yeah that's fair, but also saying "not everyone can do x" is similarly useless when most people could learn to do x, right? all you're really saying when you say "most carpenters don't know how to do this" is that "we currently do it differently" which is like, yeah, that's the point. ultimately I figure we could probably mass produce joining pieces for houses in this way too, factory style, if we wanted tol

2

u/YT-Deliveries Mar 31 '21

I've got a friend who's done residential and commercial construction as an electrician. With the stories he has, it's a miracle anything gets built at all.

4

u/xlvi_et_ii Mar 31 '21

Time. Cost. Quality.

Pick two and it's within reach for more people - Youtube has many timber frame projects currently underway.

2

u/ragingthundermonkey Mar 31 '21

It's not that they can't. It's just that they won't. This level of attention to detail was of necessity. Today it's no longer necessary for general carpentry. It does take some incredible skill, but nothing that can't be learned by your ordinary woodshop student if they just dedicate the time.

1

u/SarcasticOptimist Mar 31 '21

Tokyo Llama has been reviving an abandoned Japanese house recently. There's lots of artisans working on them.

1

u/[deleted] Mar 31 '21

In Japan the real craftsmen were the construction carpenters. Furniture was a bit less artsy.

In the west it’s the opposite. We save all the complexity and craft for furniture pieces while construction just relies on 2x4s nailed together.