[worik]

Yes.

I have been doing quite a bit of building over the last decade at my house and will do more in the coming decade.

Definitely using as many prefabricated materials from Western Europe as I can.

There have been so many advances in manufacturing in the last two decades and so little sign of them on building sites.

I wish I could use locally manufacturers but where I live (Aotearoa) the building industry has become obsessed with using the lowest quality wood available, (tannalised pinus radiata) and plastic whatsits up the whazo and then supplying the parts unfinished. Meaning weeks of painting and finishing.

In Western Europe they have much better timber and an appreciation of quality we do not have.

Building sites should be places where things are assembled, not constructed. The construction should happen in a factory mostly automated with modern machinery.

[idiotsecant]

Dumping the carbon to ship a panelized structure from western Europe is a huge use of resources, even if you aren't forced to actually shoulder the burden of externalities like carbon emission and irresponsible old growth harvest.

Building with pine actually works really, really well - pine is both cheap and plentiful, and depending on exact geography it's generally a reasonably small carbon footprint. We've spent a long time figuring out how to build well with less than ideal materials and the techniques to do so are well understood, if not always implemented properly. The difference between a well constructed pine framed structure and a poorly constructed one is in the details. Find someone who is paying the proper attention to those details and you'll have a superior product without the massive supply chain and all that entails.

[lostlogin]

That doesn’t change OPs point though. Pine is not a good wood and it requires a ton of work to finish it (plaster board, stopping and paint). It’s only attribute is that it grows fast.

Another issue is that building sites have massive wastage. It’s just so demoralising walking past their skips. If walls were prefabricated and shipped it would be hard to do worse than NZs current standard, even with shipping from a long distance.

I’ve seen over ordered materials just binned rather than collected and returned or sold.

[worik]

> Dumping the carbon to ship a panelized structure from western Europe is a huge use of resources,

Containerised hipping is very efficient. My point is it is better to use those resources rather than the local building industry. Very odd.