[gbronner]

The author fails to connect the dots:

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.

[crazygringo]

Huh?

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".

[aeturnum]

> 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.

[PaulHoule]

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.

[brudgers]

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.

https://www.harborfreight.com/saw-mill-with-301cc-gas-engine...

[hbarka]

Once more down the rabbit hole: Chainsaw mill https://youtu.be/cfBKPz9nrvE

[CydeWeys]

I love how it's just a horizontal bandsaw that runs on tracks. What more do you really need?

[gbronner]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hagvGTyEMUA

An axe and a broadaxe and a chalk line (though people originally just used charcoal).

Making beams is not that hard, especially if you have lots of wood and not a lot to do in the winter.

[theGnuMe]

That’s amazing.

Whenever someone says, I want to write X program from scratch. I’m going to send them this link.

[gbronner]

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.

[ohthatsnotright]

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.

[SkipperCat]

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.

[gbronner]

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.

[kelnos]

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.

[jeffrallen]

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.

[bigmattystyles]

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)

[maherbeg]

They actually wrote a whole article on dry-wall and theorizing on what the next iteration of it could look like https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/comparing-process...

[hammock]

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.

[danans]

> 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.

[jeffrallen]

In Europe we use Fermacell, which is like drywall but much more substantial. It is made from recycled paper and cement.

[dmtroyer]

I think balloon framing preceded drywall by quite a long time.

[csours]

They have talked about drywall in a previous post.

[lotsofpulp]

In what ways does drywall make a house worse?

[peatmoss]

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.

[bombcar]

Drywall provides a significant amount of structural strength- it braces the walls something pretty fierce even if you can kick it.

It also lets all the “look good” labor be done at the very last moment.

In my personal opinion the only thing that comes close is shiplap and it don’t look as good to some and doesn’t fireblock as well.

[danans]

It also can serve as a decent primary air barrier as long you don't put big holes in it.

[bombcar]

Or any holes at all - it turns out that a TON of moisture can get through even a small hole: https://www.buildingenclosureonline.com/articles/88629-perme... (third image)

[clairity]

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.

[lazide]

Bwaha, that’s just not true.

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.

[engineer_22]

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:

https://up.codes/s/shear-walls-sheathed-with-other-materials

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.

[SkipperCat]

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.

[frosted-flakes]

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.

[sgerenser]

It’s also pretty common in New England (Boston area especially) although almost unheard of outside that area in the U.S.

[asmithmd1]

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?

[erik_seaberg]

Only the treated surface is water resistant, so you might get mold or rot inside.