What are your houses made out of?

r/

It’s kind of amusing to me, because I sometimes see europe making fun of american home saying they’re put together with nothing but paper. What are european homes made out of? or does it depend on the country?

Comments

  1. ubus99 Avatar

    Bricks and concrete, foam insulation on the outside, double glass windows. Roofs are usually clay or concrete tiles, tarboard if flat.
    Woodframe houses, thatched roofs and wood tile facades exist, but only for historic houses, no one builds like that anymore.
    Interior walls are either brick or sheetrock(is that really the name?) Except if load bearing, then they are concrete as well.

  2. lucapal1 Avatar

    It depends.

    The most common type of building here in my city is apartment blocks… some older (they tend to be smaller, like 4-8 floors and some much newer (mostly outside the centre and bigger, like 8-15 floors).

    I am in an older block, near the centre, around 100 years old.It’s made of bricks mostly.Tiles on the roof and tiles on the floor.

    It has very high ceilings and big windows with wooden shutters.

    Very cool inside in summer, which is what we need here!

  3. RRautamaa Avatar

    “Europe” is not a country. I discussed this with a lecturer in this field and he said that in some countries, there’s an old stigma that rich people lived in stone or brick houses and poor people in wooden houses. This is a big cultural difference because in Finland, there’s no such stigma. 90% of new detached houses are wooden construction (see here). The most popular material for the load-bearing wall is factory-built prefab elements with a wooden frame. This allows for efficient and consistently high-quality production of the sort of complex insulation that is best to have in this climate. On these buildings, the visible surface material is just cosmetic: it can be wooden board, or it can be a non-load-bearing cosmetic brick wall. The second-most common material is factory-sawn logs. Inorganic (concrete, stone, brick) comes in at third at just 10%. Nobody manually builds a timber frame on site anymore; that’s outdated technology.

    Apartment houses are usually made of reinforced concrete, but that’s because it’s cheaper to build tall from reinforced concrete than from other materials. Wooden high-rises do exist, but it’s a bit of a special and new thing: there are only 146 of them now with 5000 apartments.

  4. TywinDeVillena Avatar

    Bricks and concrete, roof tiles of clay or slate, depending on the region. Older, more rural houses, would be made of irregular stone, or even made of adobe (whitewashed with lime on the outside) in certain parts of Spain.

  5. Ok_Relation_8341 Avatar

    The building I live in is made of bricks and concrete. That is still the rule in my country (Southern Europe).