1) Nails were expensive. Timber framing does not require any nails -- it uses dowels which can be made cheaply with a drawknife.
2) Unlike @simonsarris' wood, most wood available to post and beam constructors was not particularly straight. Post and beam is very tolerant of faults in lumber.
3) With post and beam, you don't need to square all four sides of a beam. You can get away with squaring off one(the external one) plus the spots where any corner braces go. If you are hewing with a broad axe and an adze, this is a huge time saver.
4) In rural post and beam construction, the beams do not all need to be the same size. You can use whatever tree you have lying around, as long as it is big enough. This is an advantage, as you can use a local tree and save the extremely laborious trip to the sawmill
So to summarize, you can have a bunch of low-skill farmers harvesting and preparing trees for beams. Then you need a high-skill carpenter to put the mortises in and assemble the whole thing.
There are on entire sections on each of these -- 1) how nails fell in price due to steam power manufacturing, and 2-4) how standardized lumber from across the country was available cheaply when local wood was scarce, due to steam power sawmills and railroads.
The whole point is that you don't need local wood, or high-skill anybody at all.
I have no idea how you think the author doesn't "connect the dots".
> I have no idea how you think the author doesn't "connect the dots".
You are pointing to a different set of dots than gbronner.
They are talking about the advantages of post-and-beam construction - extremely tolerant of heterogeneous and uneven lumber, can avoid using nails, etc. This article gives the impression that post-and-beam construction needed tons of expensive materials and skilled laborers - but they are saying it's not the case, it just was less amenable to economies of scale. You can't ship in hearty lads to hew logs the way you can ship in boards and nails.
You can contract with "the little guys" to supply artisanal lumber, it can be cost effective. We ordered wood for a deck and it is hung up at the local sawmill. We see the winter coming in and think "should we just go to Home Depot and finished the job?"
Of course, in the past two years the Home Depot has been out of stock sometimes as well.
One night, I fell into a YouTube rabbit hole of saw mill videos…which is to say making one’s own lumber is just another DIY woodworking project, because Harbor Freight sells sawmills.
If you happen to have a bunch of high-quality logs on-site, you can get a portable sawmill to come to you. My estimate was that about $1500 worth of rental and labor yielded $5000 worth of rough-sawn custom timber, and the economics got slightly better if you had the mill there for multiple days.
This allows you to produce post and beam beams for personal use quite cost effectively -- they don't take that much time to saw, and the transportation cost is basically nil because you are going to use them on-site, and you don't pay the monster weight penalty to put them on a truck. You can't kiln dry everything, but you can air dry it, and it tends to be extremely good for construction. The waste can be burned in a wood boiler.
Most code will require it to be graded, however, to use in a building which incurs additional costs and time since proper grading has to be done at a specified or lower percent moisture content. There are ways to get certified as a grader but it's not super easy so most people either associate with a mill who has a grader or hire one of the traveling graders to go on site.
Agreed. I worked as a framer between semesters in college and some of the lumber was incredibly heavy, especially when wet (and the sites were commonly soggy). Trying to heave up a 10' 6x6 hurts my back just thinking about it.
Balloon framing requires:
chop tree -> haul log to sawmill -> cut logs extensively -> haul dimensional timber to warehouse -> haul to customer. That's great if you have a train and good roads, but if you are in the middle of the forest,
chop tree -> hew it on-site -> haul to building area is very cost effective.
If you have infinite wood (remember, clearing land requires removing the trees anyway, and people would often burn them just for the potash), it is both cheaper and better to use post and beam.
Right, but the entire point of the article is to talk about how construction evolved, in part as a response to the need to build many houses, quickly, and not require highly-skilled and specialized labor to do it.
What you are saying is also true, but is not pertinent to the article.
Balloon framing also either generates a waste stream of sawdust and offcuts, or requires a complementary industry to use that material profitably. Which today is engineered wood products and wood pellets for heating.
Shouldn't the author have also mentioned cheap drywall? To me that led to worse yet much faster and cheaper construction. It's also so easy to work with that even I learned how to do most things (slowly but well). My expensive bay-area wall feels like a carton box and I think it's because i grew up in a masoned house. (I know masoned buildings are not viable in CA due to earthquakes, but man does my house feel like it could just get blown away by a mild gust here)
I read the whole thing and didn’t really see what the next iteration of wall materials (for general household use) would look like. I saw a discussion of mostly plastic alternatives, and some kind of robot drywall finisher.
> Shouldn't the author have also mentioned cheap drywall? To me that led to worse yet much faster and cheaper construction. It's also so easy to work with that even I learned how to do most things (slowly but well). My expensive bay-area wall feels like a carton box and I think it's because i grew up in a masoned house
If it's a production builder built house, it might have 3/8 inch drywall.
1/2 or 5/8 inch drywall makes a big difference to how solid a wall feels but that usually only happens in custom high end builds.
The article linked in this thread mentions the strengths of plaster—the tech that preceded drywall. Plaster has some nice aesthetic properties, good fire resistance, good sound isolation, can be shaped into organic contours. All those things make it great, though I hate the mess of working with old work.
no, drywall is basically chalk sandwiched between paper and provides no structural strength to a wall. studs provide compressive strength while plywood provides shear (and some impact) strength to walls. metal strapping is usually added to provide tensile strength. plaster is backed by lath (wood slats), which provides some shear strength akin to plywood backing.
As long as the paper is halfway intact, drywall is very difficult to remove and provides significant strength to a wall. It’s a composite material, and excellent fire barrier.
It’s really obvious when it’s up compared to not.
It’s not as much as lathe and plaster, but lathe and plaster is extremely difficult to work with in every other way, and far more labor intensive.
Plywood on a wall is important for shear strength, but lathe and plaster doesn’t replace it. Properly designed earthquake resistant shear walls became a thing long after lathe and plaster were phased out.
i probably overstated my point by saying drywall has no shear strength, but we seem to agree that drywall < plaster & lath[0] < plywood in that respect. i'd suggest you've also overstated the strength of drywall as "significant". it's not nothing, but against an earthquake, it's approximately nothing. plywood backing, of course, is the minimum required by code for earthquake resistance.
plaster & lath is harder to work with, but has many superior qualities (re: moisture, sound, heat, malleability) that it makes it worth it in many residential cases (not so much commercial, where reconfiguration is more frequent).
that sounds to me like a (bad) renovation. what really sucks is damaged plaster & lath being ripped out and patched with drywall. that's the worst of both worlds, since you don't get the seamless barrier that is plaster or the ease of use of drywall.
Oh god there's so much bad renovations everywhere. My kitchen is technically an addition so one wall is: paint, drywall, wall paper (4 layers), lath and plaster, exterior cedar shakes, shiplap, and finally studs.
Beautiful. Part of why that happens I think is everyone is afraid to peel a layer off for fear of what they’d see underneath. A lot of contractors try to avoid renovations because it’s a never ending series of pandora’s boxes.
My favorite when checking out a potential house purchase once was a small wet spot in the middle of a wall.
When I pressed on it with my finger - and my finger went right through - into live termites!
That finger press probably saved me $75k and months of headaches.
Yeah, I now assume any minor renovation project is exactly the same as a "tear down to the studs" rebuild. When it turns out I don't have to, I feel great!
I was going to agree with you, as a university trained engineer it seemed absurd to count drywall towards structural calculations, but then I did some research.
TIL gypsum board is given some shear strength credit in the code books:
I wouldn't have guessed it, I wouldn't trust it if it was close to failure, but there it is.
I think the least attractive aspect is how drywall fails catastrophically, and once it's broken the strength can't be restored. This is probably why I didn't expect it to be counted in structural calcs.
Weak elements secured in multiple places become strong ones. Potentially extremely strong ones.
The workbenches in my shop consist of multiple cheap, crappy pressed-wood folding tables from Office Depot, secured to each other on multiple sides with equally-cheap metal brackets. You'd think this would result in a rickety, unsafe platform that would blow apart in a stiff wind or buckle under light vertical load, but instead they are stouter in all three dimensions than most actual retail-grade workbenches. (And I don't have to feel bad about drilling into them!)
I can see drywall working exactly the same way, given enough studs and enough nails. The problem to be solved -- and the lesson I learned when I hacked these workbenches into existence -- isn't necessarily insufficient rigidity, it's too many degrees of freedom.
Yeah, I wouldn't really count it for much on actual load bearing walls, but it is noticeable on non-load bearing walls, they become more stable with drywall.
The most noticeable place I've seen it is in garages; the ones that are drywalled on the inside don't seem to lean as much as those that aren't.
well that's good to know! i had an implicit assumption of load-bearing walls in my prior comments, which is why they skew the way they do. of course for non-load-bearing walls, drywall is perfectly fine, but i'd still choose plaster & lath (backed by plywood for seismic reasons) over drywall.
for a dream home, i'd love steel or mass timber for the exterior framing to reduce (maybe eliminate) interior load-bearing needs, so that interior layout is maximally configurable while still allowing lots of windows. expensive, but dreamy!
Drywall does provide structural strength. While it may be easy to to punch a hole in drywall, it is very hard to cause it to fail via shear. Think about a square made of wires. You can push on it and the joint's angles will deform from 90 degrees.
Now, if you nail a piece of cardboard to the square, the corners will stay square when force is applied because the cardboard resists that force. You could even use paper and get the same results.
Plaster and gypsum board (drywall) can be used together. The author's own house uses plastered gypboard, and from what I understand plastered gypboard is still extremely common in Europe and around the world.
We had rehab work done when we moved to a Boston area house and they skim coated everything with plaster as standard of practice. That is definitely not the standard anywhere else I have lived.
Another regional difference is they put the powder room light switch next to the door on the outside, why? Has anyone seen this in any other area?
It's a Massachusetts standard, explained to me as an early safety procedure before GFCI was invented -- and probably dating back to early exposed wiring. Separation of water and voltage.
I recently built a largish shed in my back yard and although it's obviously far simpler than an actual house, it has many of the same core elements (including balloon framing), and it really struck me that someone like me could go from idea to a reasonably well done shed with only a little past experience plus some
Googling. The traditional mortise-and-tenons approach would have far exceeded my time budget and probably been too far beyond my skill level.
The most eye opening bit of learning for me was also mentioned in the article:
"The skin of the building, which previously only served as a barrier to keep the elements out, now also braces the wood stud walls, increasing their load bearing capacity."
Prior to sheathing, the framing is downright rickety!
Funny, I just built a largish (12x16 two story) shed in my back yard, but decided to just learn timber framing because how hard could it really be?
The final cost was $5,206.72 (all local pine including boards, no plywood or glue, cedar shingles), and I partly took off about 2 months of work (working on this during the day) to frame it.
If you can stick frame a shed its certainly not beyond you to timber frame one. You'll need to read a book or two and buy a few hundred $ of chisels. But no part of it is fundamentally difficult. Before this project I've used my circular saw more for cutting down brush than building.
"You'll need to read a book or two and buy a few hundred $ of chisels."
There is a third way ... timber framing with steel column caps and timber connectors, etc. ... steel plates from Simpson that you connect with lag or through bolts.
Yeah, though this would greatly increase the expense over the chisels, I'd think. For my build you need one 1.5" and one 2" chisel (I have Sorby, ~$125 each), though a 2.5" slick is nice to have. And then some sharpening stones.
Looking at the pictures your way of doing things just seems so much error prone and error prone in a super time consuming kind of way. Like those cuts w/ a chisel have to take a while to do, they have to be precise, and if you screw up the last one the whole board and all the work you just put in it are for waste.
I'm very curious where you are getting shingles at that price! I was putting together a budget for an outdoor sauna this year, and out here (Michigan) I was getting quotes around $200 per bundle (32 sq ft coverage).
PS thanks for your posts! The goose palace and the house build are both super inspiring.
It may depend on your grade. Since this is a barn (and it would be fine for a sauna), I was using 2nd clear grade C shingles. Lots of knots, some defects, but $49 for a bundle from PJ Currier, a local lumber supply company.
Thanks! I feel like we just don't have the same supply chain over here for some of these products. Was a pain even finding clear cedar in any quantity.
Looks amazing! I recently built a 12x16 shed as well, but just a stick framed. I debated trying to do a timber frame and finally decided that I didn't have the time. I sort of regret that decision now.
I've been thinking of doing this exact thing, although with a smaller 10x12 single-level shed, just because I want to learn timber framing. Would you do it again? Any specific book recommendations?
> Learning to cut mortise and tenons took years of training as a carpenter
For the same reason you mentioned, namely Googling and YouTube videos, I don't believe this is the case either. When the pandemic first struck, I took an interest in carpentry. I found a guy named Paul Sellers who guided me through constructing not only my first project in a set of durable trestles that I still use most days today, but also my first workbench, which I built the frame using, of course, M&T joinery. Each joint while not exactly the most beautiful work is still functional and holds true. It takes some time, patience, the willingness to be steady and not rush -- traits I think we all possess or can learn to posses.
I have also since undertook some more modern carpentry jobs using construction lumber and built garage shelving, a playground for my kids, a back deck, and replaced some rotting facia boards on my home.
The takeaway for me was, while I was pleased with being able to produce useful things for my family to enjoy, the act of using a powered circular saw, wrestling with an air hose to run a dangerous nail gun, and fussing about with construction adhesive and caulk was definitely no where near as enjoyable (or therapeutic) as the process of chiseling out those mortices, or sawing wood by hand. And I am proud of all the projects I have done, but the thing I am the most proud in a weird way was the work I was able to be more intimate with.
So better here may mean more efficient and economical, which I 100% agree with. But it also comes at a loss in my view.
I dream of building a house one day, of modest size. When that time comes, I am almost certain I will attempt to do it the traditional way.
(fyi If anyone is interested in learning balloon framing, I cannot recommend Larry Haun's house framing series enough)
Nice comment. You hit the wood dowel on the head ;) regarding the chisel work being more intimate.
I think it comes down to commodity vs craft - and if the goal is to simply produce a house or to produce a house where the process and craftsmanship was good for your soul.
The loss of craftsmanship is something I think about and lament on frequently. It's not just about making things. Of course modern methods are more "efficient" in the strictest capitalistic sense.
But there is more to the puzzle than that. I fear we aren't considering what we have lost in return, not limited to relationship between master and apprentice, knowledge transfer in the most natural way, and the connection to your work, to name a few.
And with the ongoing improvements to AI via things like ChatGPT, and the learning tools and tricks and opportunities they open up, and more of the old craftsman and tradesmen and women of old passing on to the next life, we may soon start to also see the decline of knowledge soon, as we will relegate more and more of that to our models.
> Prior to sheathing, the framing is downright rickety!
Some IKEA furniture, such as their cheap bookshelves, are an amazing example of this. Basically it's a rectangle that wants to lean into being a parallelogram, and it readily does, until you tack up the backing piece which is like 1mm cardboard with dozens of nails. Cardboard that would bend, twist, rip, etc. in many directions, but works perfectly at keeping that parallelogram rectangular! Same idea with sheathing/framing.
Traditionally, furniture makers have used different types of backs to increase the rigidity of the carcass, depending on how the carcass was constructed. If it's just an open box, for example, it'll require a more significant back compared to if it has multiple dividers spanning the interior. This excerpt[0] describes a few common types with relevant illustrations.
Ikea--and other flat pack furniture--takes this approach to an extreme. Their backs are the absolute bare minimum to keep the carcass sides square under their own weight. Apply a bit of pressure to the corner of one of their bookcases, for example, and you can easily move it out of square. Cheap knockdown joinery that's meant to be easy to assemble make the problem worse. The bookcase won't have a very long lifespan, but that's acceptable for most of their customers. They're cheap and easy to replace for a reason. Other Ikea cabinets, with internal dividers, are a bit stronger because they're no longer relying on just the back to increase rigidity.
As for homebuilding, exterior sheathing plays a critical role in racking strength, resisting wind loads, etc. by effectively tying the stud wall assembly together. But as with the Ikea bookcases, for builders looking to save every penny that can be found, there are options. Stuff like Thermo-Ply--basically, aluminum-faced cardboard--is used in lieu of plywood or OSB. It might not immediately disintegrate if it's properly covered with a quality house wrap as a water-resistant barrier, but how common is that with most production builders? And that's completely ignoring serious weather events like hurricanes, which will turn all that cardboard into mush.
You can even take it a step further and rely on metal strapping and tension ties instead of structural sheathing.[1] That kind of house should at least use panels of foam insulation on the exterior, but given that it's generally a radical cost-saving measure, you'd be lucky if you even get that. Here's a terrifying video[2] walking through a new spec home that just relies on a cheap and ineffective house wrap. The unlucky buyers are going to have lots of fun with water damage, mold, bug infestation, and more. To say nothing of the house's other problems.
For barns and barndominiums there’s a the third technique which is a pole barn with set poles and trusses. For the poles today some people use tripled up 2x6s or doubled with 3/4” plywood in between. It’s easier than mortise and tenon, but setting the trusses is where things can get tricky if it’s tall.
That is, yes on pole structures which can be great.
But remember, a pole building is, ipso facto, a temporary structure. The poles are always rotting.
Even the 8x8 heartwood columns 30x coated in creosote ... after 30 years of service they had to be chopped and under-joined to prefab concrete columns.
And so with that in mind, the idea that you would replace a 6x6 column (with 6x4 = 24 inches of surface exposure to ground and fungi) with a 6x6 exterior exposure and another 24 inches of interior* exposure (between each 2x6) is crazy.
I know people are doing it. I know the wood is treated. It is in the ground and wet and if you dig it up in ten years you'll have 3 little 1x5 wedges surrounded by rich, fungus filled dirt.
I don't know if a pole structure is the right choice for (you or your project) but do yourself a favor and use actual poles.
Most barns / barndomminiums don't bury the wood - they pour concrete footings like any other normal structure and then use steel stand-off brackets proud of ground level to ensure there's no wood in contact with the earth. Then yeah, tripled up LVLs are common as well;
Maybe semantics but I don't really think of that as a pole structure anymore.
When I think of a pole structure, I think of continuous poles that extend into the ground.
Almost all of your sway strength is dependent on a continuous member going below ground level and most of the economies of a pole structure are realized by not building the footing all the way around.
That said, if you are not bound by seismic it is perfectly reasonable and I agree with you - Brettstapel[1] columns, such as sistered 2x6, would be just fine.
From your link - here is what I would think of as a pole structure:
... and we have used that product (Perma-Column) to retrofit one of our barns: 24 reps of jack up, chainsaw off, dig out hole, and insert from below ...
Yeah that's fair - most "pole barns" are no longer traditional for the reasons that you point out. They're just boring post-and-beam construction like many other structures have been built for the past 75 years. Especially now with high PSI concrete and engineered steel brackets -- you can get lateral/sheer/racking/lifting strength without digging 10-foot deep holes and fighting 40-foot long posts.
I'm currently extending my house in the UK (where this construction is less common for full houses) and the upstairs dormer is built in much the same way. While I wouldn't have described it as rickety before sheathing, it's definitely much more solid once the walls have each side covered in well nailed-on OSB - it gains a lot of stability that's otherwise lacking to a degree as there's no diagonal bracing (other than some temporary elements which are removed as you add strength).
I'm not a builder (I'm a musician for the most part), but what I've built is to a pro standard and millimetre-accurate. That wouldn't have been the case had it been post-and-beam!
It is really gratifying to look outside every day and see the finished project, that's for sure. Overall I really enjoyed it, but I found that my ability to estimate the time for each step was way off - everything took far longer than I planned. Probably lack of experience.
> bit more wear and tear on the body though
So true - it took me a loooooong time to recover from the day I poured the cement pad under the shed.
Framers use a variety of temporary braces and download to make the building work before the sheathing. (In stick framed buildings pre plywood, those diagonals are permanent, and let into the studs.) It's one of the things newbies can miss, and makes a big difference.
Not odd at all -- when weight is critical, you want to make the most out of every gram of material, ideally getting overall structure, aero skin, and pressure vessel in one.
Rockets with balloon tanks (such as the original Atlas) even rely on pressure from the propellant tank contents to strengthen the structure.
Also automobiles; in the 1960s cars mostly moved from body-on-frame to unibody construction, where the skin is an integral part. The Lincoln Town Car was one of the rare body-on-frame cars, which is why it was often used for stretch limousines; it is much easier to extend the body.
Well, if you had a giant, heavy slab at the lowest possible point - silly not to use it as a frame. Some EVs are somewhere in-between - not strictly body on frame, but also no unibody.
And they have to call it a "skateboard" to get around the biases of a generation of textbook engineers who grew up thinking that body on frame is dumb and old.
You can 'X' brace the wall and its rigidity is greatly improved.
I recently used this technique when building a temporary support wall to cut a 10'x7' hole in the side of a commercial building and had to temporarily brace several of the roof trusses
This... isn't quite right. Balloon framing as traditionally defined is all but non-existent anymore. The author is smooshing concepts together.
Balloon framing was purely a method of convenience back when consumers were able to get their hands on 30-40 foot framing timber. As such, it was only popular during a limited window when sawmills were popping up across the West and virgin old-growth forests were being clear cut.
The author is using "balloon framing" to describe the entire concept of modern framing. But if you start throwing around "balloon framing" to describe modern houses you will at best get weird looks from contractors and at worse draw the eye of fire inspectors.
It’s completely wrong. Balloon framing was eliminated because the voids extending between floors are fire hazards. Modern homes usually use platform framing… each section of the house is essentially and independently framed box that’s bolted together.
My dad was a firefighter and later a chief who served on a state codes commission. He dealt with hundreds of fires in homes built this way, they were destructive only secondarily to “cock loft” rowhouses with shared attics.
We happen to live in a house built this way - whenever we renovate a section of the house we have modifications done to exterior walls to reduce the risk, which is that a fire, say one originating in an electrical outlet, can travel up to the roof in <7m. Once the roof is involved, the house is toast in as little as 15m.
There's plenty of modern balloon framed houses still built. Tim Uhler is a Instagram-famous framer (https://www.instagram.com/awesomeframers/) working in the PNW and builds very high-performance homes, many of which are balloon framed. He's written for Fine Homebuilding about his technique and why it saves labor and reduces fall risk since they can frame, sheath, and often side the walls while they're flat on the ground and then lift them into place.
Dude is super sharp, plus wants to make sure he and his team all can work into their 50s, so they spend money on lifts and tools that make their jobs safer.
> It’s completely wrong. Balloon framing was eliminated because the voids extending between floors are fire hazards. Modern homes usually use platform framing… each section of the house is essentially and independently framed box that’s bolted together.
That's explained in the article, with a drawing even.
The author was actually looking for "stick framing", of which balloon framing is a particular technique. (The term was originally derogatory, coming from the perspective of the timber framers.)
The image comparing balloon and platform techniques should probably have suggested the existence of a broader term.
Balloon framing has a specific legally binding definition as described in building codes.
In the building codes it is a method of light wood framing (not the other way round).
It can also be a method of light metal framing…in practice this is probably more common in the wild (in the US), because long light metal studs are straight and lightweight and hence more “wieldy.”
This is a bit though like saying "LCD screens as a variation of plasma screens" because they both share a lot of parts and look similar.
They came about at the same time, and shared many of the same concepts, but they are completely different technologies, and one didn't necessarily come from the other.
It's a matter of perspective. TFA is a history, and has a historical perspective. That is, it uses the original meaning of "balloon frame". You've been talking to carpenters, who don't care much about the history but do need a name for the weird stuff they occasionally have to remodel.
"Balloon-type" balloon framing is still practiced even for new houses, because it allows a lot of exterior work to be done on the ground instead of three stories up:
In my experience, "balloon framing" meant that a two story house was framed with two story studs. That is, 14-16 foot studs, sometimes sistered if the local wood wasn't long enough.
It isn't easy to build a thermally efficient building with balloon framing. That's because you have solid wood between the inner and outer skin in hundreds of places. And wood has a thermal conductivity of 0.2 W/mK, which is pretty bad compared to say PIR foam insulation at 0.02 W/mK.
Anywhere with high energy prices, hot/cold climates, or environmentally conscious buyers, thats a no-go!
Huh? Yes it is -- that's what insulation sheathing is for, a layer in between the wood and the exterior. They're the gigantic pink foam panels you see covering buildings under construction.
Balloon framing is extremely thermally efficient, which is why it's used in places like the northeast US which have freezing winters!
Most american buildings talk about R10 to R15, and occasionally you might get up to R20 if you build it well. Verticals of balloon framing are usually ~R5.
New buildings in England need to have walls of R32 as an absolute legal minimum (and more for ceilings and floors). And England has pretty mild weather compared to much of the USA.
(Edit: never mind, deleted misinformed comment as londons_explore helpfully explained that I was comparing US imperial units to European SI units. Thanks, londons_explore!)
R values in Europe are metric, whereas the US is imperial. The conversion factor is 5.67. All values in my post are in imperial units to be consistent with the original poster and most of the HN readership.
Eh, kind of. Builders in the northeast didn’t choose balloon framing because it’s thermally efficient - they just didn’t have alternatives in the same cost range. Many homes in that region were build with masonry claddings as well to increase thermal mass and R value of the wall.
The foam sheet insulation you speak of is relatively new to the industry, at least for middle class homes. Having a continuous layer of insulation outside the framing definitely makes stick framing more energy efficient than it would be with traditional fiberglass batt insulation in a wall cavity.
Frustrating to find that they're more expensive than regular studs - they ought to be cheaper because they need less wood to make, less mass to transport, etc.
The actual manufacturing steps I'm sure are all automated, and not exactly complex, so the added manufacturing steps should be far outweighed by the reduced raw material and logistics cost.
I'm going to guess the increased price is some combination of 'we have a patent on it' and 'we charge more because there are no competitors, because we have a patent on it'.
Structural insulated panels are lightweight and efficient in terms of materials, but they are a long lead time engineered product manufactured in bespoke factories for specific requirements of each project.
Which is to say there are shop drawings and you can’t just go down to the store on Saturday and strap a few to the roof of your station wagon even if you just want to build a shed.
In the broad sweep of history they are a modern product.
But in 1995 I worked with a guy who used to work at the local plant. That’s how I learned about them.
Later he and his brother built a house out of them…that’s where the panels on top of the wagon image comes from.
It's notable how building construction is very regional.
For example, balloon framing is very rare in most of Europe - where people generally prefer brick, stone, blocks or even cast concrete. Something that won't rot away or creak in the wind.
Indeed. I used to look down on the balloon framing + drywall construction used in the US. Until I bought a house in an earthquake zone and learned that my preferred building techniques involving brick and mortar would be completely unsafe. Then I thought about cold climate energy efficiency, and my way was pretty much terrible and once again inadequate.
Understanding the requirements made me develop a lot of respect for balloon framing.
I think it's not that people in Europe prefer sturdier stuff, I think it's that all the wood has already been cut down, so timber construction is not priced cheaply enough to offset its disadvantages vs. masonry.
> Something that won't rot away or creak in the wind.
Even in parts of the US that have a much harsher environment than any part of Europe -- extremely hot and humid weather conducive to wood rot, termite infestations, hurricanes and tornadoes -- people still build with wood because it's a lot cheaper. Sometimes I think it's strange, but it also makes sense, I suppose.
Stick and frame is an excellent construction technique. Built to modern code it'll not creak in the wind nor rot away. Further it can be framed by one person if needed with nothing more than a pick up truck and a local hardware store. It'll not fall over in an earthquake. Renovations are easy. Insulating is easy. It's a carbon sink. And best yet, it's much cheaper to build.
The biggest issue with stick framing is the building envelope. It's very sensitive to the quality of the air/water barrier. Lots of subpar contractors around that don't care about taping together different pieces of house wrap, covering fastener and conduit holes, taping the window and door apertures correctly. You end up with moisture inside your walls and thermal losses that are annoying to diagnose and even more annoying to fix.
Indeed, in New Zealand, for residential housing we have traditionally avoided such materials due to earthquakes. Timber framing is better at moving with the energy of an earthquake, so less likely to fail, and when it fails, well, it's far less heavy if it lands on you.
The only injuries that occurred timber framed houses in Christchurch in the 2011-02-22 earthquake were from brick chimneys falling through the roof.
Ballon framing filled with insulation and covered with insulating sheathing is far more energy-efficient than old walls made of brick, stone, or concrete in the winter. That's why in the freezing northeast of the USA, it's all balloon framing -- while in sunny Florida they can build with cinder blocks instead.
Europe doesn't really have winter compared to North America, unless you're making a quip about their energy crisis ;-). Compare someplace continental and ridiculously far north like Rovaniemi, Finland to, say, Fargo, ND; the latter has colder winters, despite being 20 degrees of latitude further south. And yet everyone in Fargo builds with stick frames.
A well-built and well-maintained wood house can last multiple generations and keep warm in the meantime. Though, granted it's probably more expensive to maintain than equivalent masonry.
The American interior generally does not benefit from the same moderating influence of major water bodies as Scandinavia does. The winters are quite different. That's why you can have frequent awfully cold conditions as far south as Oklahoma (and sometimes Texas) despite being as far south as Egypt or Jordan.
As others pointed out, I nitpicked the one place in Scandinavia that would actually get cold, to make the comparison fair. Places further north than Rovaniemi (my example) that are closer to the ocean, like Tromsø, have milder winters due to the moderating influence of the Gulf Stream.
This is a fairly well-known concept. From a starting place in Europe, usually one has to travel 10-15 degrees of latitude south to find similar winter temperatures in North America. See:
- Helsinki, Finland vs. Syracuse, NY: 17 degrees of latitude
- Warsaw, Poland vs. Pittsburgh, PA: 12 degrees
- Berlin, Germany vs. Roanoke, VA: 13 degrees
You have to go into Russia to find truly cold winters. Kazan, probably the coldest major city in the European side of Russia, has similar winter temperatures to Edmonton, AB, only two degrees further south.
True, also to note brick construction traditionally can be dirt cheap if you adjust for materials and processes that are readily available locally. Nowadays there’s the option to go with hollow concrete blocks which makes building way faster and cheaper as well.
As a builder, I really don't get the point of this piece arguing that stick framing is "worse". The author makes very weak arguments for the "worse" category to make a connection to tech engineering/ software development.
> Balloon frame has a few disadvantages. One major one is that the exterior wall studs all the way to the roof, which provides an unbroken path for fire to travel.
Fire blocking is a very simple and well-known practice that avoids this pitfall completely. the failure to mention fire blocking makes me question the authors overall construction competence.
It feels as if they are arguing that stick framing is worse than timber frame construction because it's "more difficult to engineer many more smaller connection points". which may have been the case in the early days of stick framing, but like in software development, builders have developed codes, standards, conventions etc. that make modern framing very much a straightforward process. As well as all the fasteners and metal hardware has been exhaustively engineered.
> And beyond that, as a structural system, it lacks any sort of aesthetic elegance or simplicity. It’s made up of lots of flimsy-looking members.
Yea, thats the point! Structural elements do not need to have any aesthetic appeal as they are hidden by finishes and cladding. Its a feature, not a bug. As long as it is structurally sound, that is all that matters.
> It’s undesirable from an architectural perspective as well. Balloon framing has largely been used for simple residential structures (or worse, mobile homes) that have historically had little architectural involvement. The size and strength of dimensional lumber makes it difficult to use it to create large or architecturally impressive spaces... The architecturally influential residential buildings are more often built from more flexible materials such as concrete or steel.
I disagree with this as I've seen some incredibly beautiful "architectural" homes that used wood framing but that's subjective and not my primary objection. Where i have more of an issue that now the author is comparing wood stud framing to concrete and steel which is an apples to oranges comparison. It's an inconsistency it what the main subject is being compared to that makes the overall thesis of this fall very flat for me.
The "worse is better" paradigm may make sense for many software applications, but the connection here to residential construction and framing practices is such a strecth.
Others have mentioned that it's a little murky if the author is critical specifically of balloon framing or of stick built construction in general.
The irony is that balloon framing is more feasible today than ever. Balloon framing downsides:
1. Really long dimensional lumber
2. Fire risk of continuous cavities
3. Ledger/joist connection to balloon studs
The solutions?:
1. Engineered lumber. Dead straight and incredibly strong LSL (laminated strand lumber) and LVL (laminated veneer lumber) come in basically whatever length you reasonably need them.
2. Fire blocking is well understood. Insulation materials like mineral wool can further drive fire risk inside a stud cavity to near zero.
3. An innumerable number of well engineered and reasonably priced structural fasteners and metal connectors with well understood properties make it straight forward to build a second story floor off of balloon framed studs.
2022 is a great time to be balloon framing. In fact, you'll see it in large great rooms for floor to vaulted ceiling walls. Some framers who like to preassemble as much as possible on the ground and then lift the wall for efficiency and safety will balloon frame as well.
Interesting... In Europe, we simply build the houses using bricks, cement/concrete and beans of steel or concrete. We not waste wood, and the houses are more solid and not have problems with insects or moisture damaging the wood structure. I think that it's the usual since the 60's .
However, I saw older structures using wood beans, mixed with stone, bricks, and/or adobe.
In at least some parts of the UK brick clad wooden houses, which I would imagine are probably balloon framed, are somewhat common in new developments (East Anglia, for example).
Insulated cavity walling with blockwork inner leaf and brickwork outer leaf (or sometimes rendered blockwork) remains incredibly popular though.
This is a very good article about balloon framing and how houses are built. However, balloon framing is NOT an example of worse-is-better. Post-and-beam, the technique that balloon and platform framing have replaced, is just worse-is-worse. It requires more effort, more expensive materials, more skilled labor, and is less sophisticated in how it uses materials and so for the same amount of materials produces a weaker and less stable, less efficient structure.
Worse-is-better is about how a faster to market, good enough solution that people can use is better than the 'better' solution that comes later. The solution that is simple will be used again and again, the elegant solution that is more efficient or more general but harder to apply will be neglected since users have high skill with the simpler tool and will prefer it as a result. Balloon framing (and then platform framing) is simpler AND more elegant AND far cheaper AND produces a superior result, so it's simply not a case of worse-is-better.
This video is worth watching on the topic: The Genius of 2x4 Framing by Stewart Hicks
It covers similar ground and has a thesis that “what allowed the hamburger to take over as the quintessential American cuisine and get exported everywhere are the same historical, cultural and economic confluences that contribute to the proliferation of the light wood frame for construction. . . . Light wood framing is the hamburger of the building industry”
It is interesting to note that post and beam construction is still fairly common in the US. Just not for residential buildings. It is used extensively for agricultural barns and commercial and light industrial buildings particularly in rural areas.
Often buildings that have sheet metal exteriors are "post framed". Post framing is quite similar to post and beam. A "mortise and tenon" connection is implemented for securing the roof trusses to the posts. On site laminated 2x material is used or a notch is cut in post.
> Something as simple as installing a lightswitch all of a sudden becomes a major piece of coordination if your building is made of concrete.
It seems most buildings in Taiwan are simply made of concrete. IDK too much about construction but when I watch them build it's like, frames of metal into which they pour wet concrete. It's crazy how fast buildings get put up this way, they tore down an entire building down the street from me, started construction about maybe 3 weeks ago tops, and today there is a fully formed building with fixtures, windows, the works, sitting there. Quite pretty, actually.
But this quote is for me one of the huge downsides. It's a NIGHTMARE to hang anything on my walls, first off. If I try to put a pin in for a poster, it bends. A nail could end up taking out chunks of the wall if I'm not careful, if I can even penetrate. And, once the fixtures are in, that's it. To run more wire, you've got to get out the (I think?) jackhammer. It seems every day all I hear is the sound of concrete being banged away at with some kind of power tool. If it's happening in my building, it's reverberating through the whole structures. It's horrible lol.
There's upsides though! Normal sounds stop HARD at the boundaries of an apartment. If you're outside someone's apartment door, maybe you'll hear something, but we don't hear shit from the neighbors, and I've checked, they can't even hear when I'm producing bass heavy music. I like that. Gotta make sure to get some stuff up on the walls though to prevent echo.
Yes but if you need it somewhere the conduit doesn't run, you've gotta bang more conduit into the wall.
Frankly I find it terrifying cause I don't think the contractors know anything about that structure of the building and who knows what they're doing to the structural integrity of a building in an earthquake zone. Like I said I'm ignorant of this stuff so maybe its not a big deal.
I don't see how is this comparable to "worse is better".
It's just "simpler is better for simpler things", which is hardly controversial. Use two dimensions of wood, simple connectors like nails, simple hand tools, less precision work. Heck, you end up using less wood even if you heavily overprovision and thus tolerate local faults, compared to large-beam construction. It's an aerospace-grade win.
What "worse is better" means in the software world is that an easy-to-do solution overtakes all, from simplest things where it belongs to the very top. This way PHP, which was a poorly-made thing even according to its creator, not just took over the space of simple dynamic websites, but also ended up powering world's largest services, such as Wikipedia and Facebook. (Now PHP looks hip; back when Wikipedia and FB experienced their meteoric growth, it sucked as hard as the legends have it, at everything about programming craft, but was a piece of cake to run and host.) For the author's analogy to hold, the Empire State Building would have to be built with balloon frame technology, and somehow stand.
I agree with most of your points, the article gets it backwards in lots of ways. The worse solution generally comes first, it's worse because it was 'quick and dirty' and didn't try to elegantly and optimally solve the problem. The worse solution generally is actually worse in some significant ways, but these defects are small compared to the advantage of being a solution that is available much earlier and conceptually simple enough for users to successfully apply without lots of training and false starts. Balloon framing is so easy that you can watch a video and then go do it, it requires simpler tools, cheaper lumber, and much less precision. There's no working worse-is-better analogy here, which is why nobody uses post-and-beam framing for anything outside of niche luxury homes. It's not better in any way other than looking older.
> sprinkler systems have reduced the risk fire poses
Not so fast. My 5+1 has loads of sprinklers and its a nightmare. Every few years the sprinklers start leaking, or someone drills a hole or breaks a spinkler pipe. It causes catastrophic damage. Its one of the main reasons my next place will be concrete.
There's been some very interesting advances made with ICF (insulated concrete forms). If you live in a natural disaster prone area and are building from scratch, I'd check them out.
Sprinklers slow fire spread in buildings that are properly constructed. If fire can spread inside the walls and above ceilings a sprinkler is not going to do much.
The thing about "X is worse-is-better" is that it applies to pretty much anything. Take "X", observe that it has pros and cons, and you can go on and claim worse (cons) is better (pros).
I built a shed in my back yard a couple years ago. I got yelled at by the people on a certain carpentry forum for straying from the balloonframe orthodoxy. Nonetheless, my shed is solid as a brick and widely admired for its looks AND engineering.
Much of what is called proper modern shed engineering (IE the building code) is actually just how to meet the minimum legal requirements for the least amount of cash. So keep that in mind.
My next shed is going to be a bag of air sprayed with foam.
In the appendix links at the bottom, there's a comment that a large percentage of houses in Japan are still built with post & beam. I've been prompted with a slew of recent "Japanese carpentry videos" that seem to sync with this.
I'm curious why it's still prevalent in Japan? Most new Japanese houses are not built in the old machiya style.
> Prefabrication of larger components, outside of a few building types optimized for it, remains elusive
I thought this was a weird one. Aren't roof trusses pretty often made off-site and delivered and craned into place? I also see trucks with framed-out walls driving around that just seem to need to be lifted and nailed into place. Is that not what those are?
Yes, but trusses can only be used in houses where you use trusses? It means you do not have much or any usable attic space, and the roof shape has to be a very simple gable roof with the living space completely non-intersecting with the roof structure space.
One reason I've heard is the much higher cost (and lower availability) of appropriate lumber. The forests were mostly cut down hundreds of years ago, while in north America, that process is still underway (though thankfully slowing a bit).
I'm not sure forests being cut down is the problem these days. Wood is one of the most renewable and sustainable materials out there. Old growth has been cut down, or become out of most people's price range at this point in NA, but farmed fast growing pine is cheap and sustainable. Perhaps NA has more land to support such farms though.
The US cut down its forests too! Since the early 20th century, it started to replant more trees than it cut, and now has an ever increasing area of forests, much more than in 1930s for example.
Total area is up .. from the 1930s. However, some of the most wooded areas (e.g. the Pacific NW) are currently at about 20% of what they were when europeans arrived.
They are not comparable at all in quality, sturdiness and fire resistance. Since you are paying for a home most of your working life anyway one would better have a real thing.
My previous house was a balloon framed townhouse built in 1930. My current house is a balloon framed house built in 1940. For the same amount of money you get a house that is 2 or 3 times larger and yet more power efficient when you build with wood, and both of the houses I have owned had 2 or 3 families grow up and old in them before mine. In Europe and Asia they build with stone and concrete, and people make due with less space, and they can't afford to heat them without cheap Russian gas. It's good that houses in the UK are finally required to be built with some insulation, but Europe is decades behind on this.
They do. Finland and Russia love their timber houses (although Russia still mostly uses solid timber walls due to the lower quality of lumber and the lack of skilled labor).
There are countries in Europe where wood buildings are common (and even most popular option for e.g. single-family homes). They can be considered the slightly cheaper option though.
now seriously: i have seen some wood structure in northern Europe. but in general, using bricks creates sturdier, better isolated houses. that can resists for centuries, literally. they don't mold. they don't burn. so why not? it's just better from my point of view.
Wood has advantages. For one, insulation is easier. A lot of the current best practices for insulating a brick building are basically to build a different kind of building, insulate it, and then add a cosmetic brick facade. But in a Mediterranean climate insulation is less of a concern and some thermal mass to even out the evening vs daytime temperature is enough. Sturdy is a matter of what you're trying to achieve - for example wood is superior in earthquake zones. But the real deciding factor is the cost of materials and labor - in much of Europe wood is more expensive and craftspeople are more familiar with other techniques. The converse is true for much of the USA. Wood is also just as long lived - hundreds of years if well maintained and kept dry (at least in regions where termites aren't endemic). The biggest problem with short lived American residential construction isn't the wood but instead the use of engineered materials and fixtures with finite lifespans. For example laminate flooring and older plastic water piping which is expected to last only a few decades before needing to be gutted and rebuilt.
And they don't evolve. They are hard to replace and are expensive. Most Houses need to last 30 or 50 years. European Houses last twice as long. Instead of modern houses there are so many old bad isolated houses with chimneys for firewood instead of heat pumps and solar roofs.
Why? It seems absurd to me to only have a dwelling last for half a lifetime. This view seems to assume a disposable, consumerist logic, which seems at odds in my view both from reasonable use of energy and time and with a sustainable civilization.
Your average house in the city is going to get bulldozed after 30-50yr because in that time things will change enough that someone is going to want to develop the site into something else.
Your average farm house is probably a 200yr structure.
I once made a friend who is a property developer very happy by pointing out that his new building (built with traditional materials) in Edinburgh's New Town might still be standing in a 1000 years whereas I'm lucky if anything I do lasts 10 years.
I think I disagree, from experience, old houses can be retrofitted quite successfully to the modern age, while wooden houses just seem to age much faster.
Plenty of hundred and more year old wooden houses where I live in Norway. It can be hard to tell though until you see someone take off the external planks to renew them and you seethe solid baulks of timber underneath.
My wooden house was built in 1953 with a concrete watertight cellar serving as the foundation. The wood doesn't start until more than half a metre above ground. I see no reason why it shouldn't last another fifty years or more.
I've never lived in anything that wasn't at least 50 years old and usually at least 200 years old - so that seems very odd to me. Mind you, I appreciate different countries and cultures etc.
Next you will be saying that roofs need to be replaced every 10 years! ;-)
No, worse is worse but by finding novel ways to defect in the quality/quantity prisoner's dilemma it dominates while the world becomes more and more terrible.
Since this is hacker news, I feel like the direct analogue here is the dominance of Python and Javascript over other (higher activation energy) programming languages.
Luckily we are not allowed to build houses like software bros on HN are allowed to build billion dollar companies. A shitty tech stack going down doesn't often burn down other companies. But a city full of balloon frames leads to an entire city burning to the ground.
If anything, the modern building code is a testament to why the way people on HN build software is at best irresponsible and at worst a threat to society.
Gerald Weinberg put it better: "If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization."
1) Nails were expensive. Timber framing does not require any nails -- it uses dowels which can be made cheaply with a drawknife.
2) Unlike @simonsarris' wood, most wood available to post and beam constructors was not particularly straight. Post and beam is very tolerant of faults in lumber.
3) With post and beam, you don't need to square all four sides of a beam. You can get away with squaring off one(the external one) plus the spots where any corner braces go. If you are hewing with a broad axe and an adze, this is a huge time saver.
4) In rural post and beam construction, the beams do not all need to be the same size. You can use whatever tree you have lying around, as long as it is big enough. This is an advantage, as you can use a local tree and save the extremely laborious trip to the sawmill
So to summarize, you can have a bunch of low-skill farmers harvesting and preparing trees for beams. Then you need a high-skill carpenter to put the mortises in and assemble the whole thing.