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Housing market
(thelemmy.club)
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this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2026
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What's wrong with making houses out of wood? It's renewable. It has an absurdly low carbon footprint. It's a fantastic building material.
Over the last 50 years material quality and workmanship have gone down. Now it's a race to build a neighborhood as cheaply and quickly as possible, doing the job right be damned.
I'll be honest with you: my house was built in the 1940s and it's really not that great. Definitely not noticeably better build quality than my parents' house built in the 1990s.
You should look up CyFy on YouTube. He does residential building inspection in Arizona and the build quality is appalling. Broken trusses, lacking insulation, roof leaks, stucco with exposed wire backing on top of literal cardboard for structure...
Cracks in the sinks and tubs, walls so horrifying out of square you wonder how they managed to fuck it up that badly. Unlevel floors with humps or saddles. Tiles misaligned so badly you can take a strip off your foot without realizing.
There's always multiple things from the above in every house he posts... And it's not just one house, it's all of them. Literally all of them... They deny, delay, defend the shit out of warranty claims and at least in Arizona hope you close and don't raise a fuss before hand.
How could you leave out the gas leaks? In every single fucking house he inspects.
Oh yeah you're right lol I forgot about those somehow! I laughed when he checked like 8 houses in a row and they all leaked.
That's because he doesn't get called in unless the homeowner believes there are egregious problems for him to find. It's sampling bias, not a universal trend.
We had a new subdivision in which every single roof failed in 6 years.
He talks about this in his videos where he'll see the same problems in half the homes in a neighborhood because neighbors talk to each other and recommend him
Edit: just watch some of his videos you won't have to spend much time to see what I mean. It's systemic...
"Systemic" within one neighborhood (or even one builder) isn't the same as "systemic" in general. I mean, of course if one builder doing something wrong, he's likely to be doing it wrong consistently. But unless that builder is, say, D.R. Horton (which, to be fair, it very well could be), you can't really say that just because one random builder is doing it wrong that means the entire industry is doing it wrong.
Yeah just watch his videos. He's not beholden to one builder or one neighborhood he's all over the place and inspects on dozens of builders.
Builders know most of the buyers are Boomers who will be dead in under a decade, so make everything last 11 years.
I'll add that I recently bought a house built in the last decade and the home inspector remarked how well put together it was.
Wood is fine. It actually traps carbon, but the build quality is horrendous and permit inspectors must be corrupt.
They're not talking specifically about the lumber being bad, they're talking about companies building new developments cutting corners to save on cost. While they still use lumber, they are choosing cheaper lumber and their workmanship suffers as a result of the corners being cut.
Thus, a pile of lumber and tape.
My house was built in 1942 as temporary worker housing. I tore down and rebuilt one of the walls and the original studs were just astonishing: perfectly straight and not a single knot in them anywhere. Compare and contrast with modern studs from Home Despot: split, shaped more or less like a pretzel, and 50% knots.
Interestingly, these old studs were 1.75" x 3.75". I never knew there was an intermediate stage between the old-time true 2x4s and the modern 1.5" x 3.5" 2x4s.
it's not Home Depot's fault we cut down all the old growth wood by the 1950s. Builders should be sorting the lumber and returning bad pieces...but nothing a sheet of drywall can't hide.
But Home Depot wood in Canada is the best quality, kiln dried. With softwood tariffs, US yards are scraping the bottom of the barrel and shipping crap that would have been shredded.
Also, older homes were built with natural old growth lumber, which is denser and more rot resistant. They also used larger dimensions for extra support.
I will give you an example, a notoriously large home manufacturer has continued to create waves of houses built with the cheapest materials they can find. Once people started to move into these houses they noticed something strange: insects ripping out of their newly built walls
they probably live in an area without a lot of earthquakes so it makes sense to build out of brick there
laughs in PNW
uh
this is 7 years old, but i wanted to argue my "uh"'s point a little more
love from San Francisco. I woke up the other day to a 5.6 alarm. My love to Yreka who got the brunt of it.
Better a ton of smalls than one big one. The energy released in a huge quale is several orders of magnitude so it takes a lot...
yeah, i was in loma prieta. that was "just" a 6.9. you could see the waves in the ground, visually, dozens of miles away, until it settled. it was eerie as fuck.