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Making a House That Will Last for Centuries?
tcyun asks: "The intro text from kaisyain's review brought up a thought that has been floating around in my head as I am a new home-owner. If one wanted to design a home that would last for hundreds of years, what would one have to do? I, and many of my friends, have recently/ purchased homes. As with all homes, some things are in good shape, others are not. Many items are the fault of initial design, many are due to poor upkeep and repairs. Looking around, it is possible to have a home last for hundreds of years (my family's ancestral home is about 400 years old and there are castles in Europe that are older). If one wanted to build/modify a home, what would one need to do to make sure that the home would still be standing, and usable, hundreds of years from now?" M : Wired suggests going underground.
"A few elements come to mind: structural integrity, usability, reparability, ease of upkeep, physical location (geology and neighborhood), technology, and aesthetics.
- Structural integrity: Rock lasts a long time, but has a variety of draw backs. Concrete (poured or cinder block) foundations are common where I live but wood is still the material used for most of the structure. Should steel cross-beams be considered for parts of the structure? I have heard good things about laminated/engineered wood.
- Technology: Folks on Slashdot have talked about wiring homes with cat-5/7/x and installing empty conduit 'just in case.' Is this really useful with the proliferation of wireless? Would it be more useful if a crawlspace was made available between the ceiling and the attic so that any type of ducting/wiring could be run into a room? Should all rooms have access to a central column through which wiring, plumbing and ducting were run?
- Usability: I have a small house with a small, combined living-family-dining room. I am fairly sure that 50 years ago the designers were not laying out the space to take into account book shelves, a large television, stereo cabinet, gaming consoles, and more in addition to a couch, chair and dining table. Simply making the room larger is one option, but cavernous space is not necessarily good for usability. What would be a good floor plan and how might different sized rooms be distributed to be useful over time for multiple purposes? Would it need a bathroom? (joke)
- Reparability: the previous homeowners made a number of DIY 'improvements' which are nice, until one needs to make a repair. Many items are installed in ways where the only option is to remove entire installations. What types of modular improvements can be made that allow for easy repair/replacement over time as needs change?
- Location: How would one choose where to build a home that would last for hundreds of years? Do you pick an existing neighborhood, space that is at the edge of a town/city or somewhere further out? Does one pick a neighborhood that has been economically/geologically/stable/safe over the longer term even if it is not in great shape at the moment. At first glance, cities in the United States like San Francisco, Detroit, Chicago, Pittsburgh have all gone through 10-20 years spells of nastiness, but have been fairly stable cities at the macro level for a hundred years.
- Aesthetics: Does one simply design/architect and deal with the fact that it will variously become attractive/unattractive over time?
And to complicate matters, how different are the options if one imposes a budget for initial construction (depending on your own idea of what a realistic budget is)."
My friend and I theorized about creating a house in a cliff face. The house would be dug (excavated?) into the rock, and shaped to your needs.
Important things to remember in this plan were things such as:
- A sub-floor or crawlspace below the lowest floor to allow for water drains, wiring, etc.
- Plenty of internal space for ventilation (depending upon the type of rock there could be Radon issues).
- Insulation, depending upon the climate, your rock walls could be cold around the front of the house.
I very much like the "conduit" suggestion of yours. I think it is a good solution to have a centralized access method like that. It allows for easier service, and you never have to worry about where you are going to run that wire.
I would still run network wiring, as wireless should only be used in situations where wires aren't practical/convenient - portable devices mostly. As computers improve, that bandwidth becomes important in-house. (movies, music, etc)
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
Were spent in a home that dated from the 17th century in rural England.
;-)
The house was all stone construction with huge oak beams and a lovely flagstone floor in the kitchen. That is how to build a house that lasts for hundreds of years.
Unfortunately, it's very expensive to build homes that way these days. And flagstone kitchen floors are damn cold in winter
-psy
No joke. Old-fashioned water taps with metal seats and rubber washers will wear out but they are then repairable. The parts are terribly standard. Even if they weren't, they could be made out of common materials at some point in the future. Washerless faucets, otoh, use proprietary and expensive gadgets to control the flow of water. Some are not repairable. Some are, but require expensive, funky kits. And all of them will be eventually go out of fashion and their replacement parts along with them.
Faucets with washers and seats. With $10 in spare parts, they'll last for 10 lifetimes. If I ever build my own home, I'm gonna use faucets with plain round rubber washers and simple, standard metal seats.
The ex-apartment-maintenance man in me wouldn't have it any other way.
Step 1: use stone and concrete. The Romans used stone and concrete extensively, and many of their public works projects are STILL standing two thousand years later. Today we have reinforced concrete, which is even stronger than anything the Romans had. Also, this will make it prohibitively expensive to tear your house down if anyone gets any bright ideas about turning your property into a parking lot in a hundred years.
Step 2: Use concrete for interior walls, floors, well, basically everything. What's the first thing to go in old houses? The roof. And, when it does, water gets into the house and the whole structure rots. A concrete roof will keep water out, which is the most important thing if you want the house to last.
Step 3: Don't use glass for the windows. You can get a 4x8 sheet of inch-thick lexan or plexiglass, which is bulletproof by the way, for 175 bucks down on Canal Street in NYC. It's an extremely resilient material.
Step 4: Don't build the electric and etc into the walls. Design the house so that everything is retrofit, i.e. bolted onto the surface. That way you can always strip it out and replace it later. Note that you can't do this with plumbing, but no plan is perfect. Go for PVC pipes there; at least they won't rust.
Step 5: Paint EVERYTHING with a polymer-based paint to waterproof it.
Step 6: make sure the house sits at the base (or top) of a cliff or some other construction-inconvenient location. Then plant LOTS of oak trees all over the place. Within fifty years they'll turn into a nice forest. This has a couple of benefits:
A) if anyone tries to build on your property, the tree huggers will come out and Hayduke their machinery. They'll also spike the trees, which makes it reeeeeeeally tough to chainsaw them down safely.
B) Even if the local town board figures out how to get around the environmentalists, it'll cost 'em a fortune to knock down all those trees and make room for a wrecking crane to go for the house. They'll give up and go somewhere else.
Step 7: Cultivate the area around the house into a wetland, then make sure every environmentalist in the area is aware that it's there. Then, get the EPA in to declare it a wetland. This is way easier than you might think. It makes it just about impossible for anyone to build anything there ever again.
STEP 8, the MOST IMPORTANT STEP: Put the whole property into some kind of legal trust, so that you don't even really own it anymore and no one can sue you for it. Then, set up the trust so that it just passes along to your children, and so on. Your descendents will have use of the house forever, basically, but won't be able to sell it. In the process, make sure there's enough money in the trust to pay the taxes for at least the foreseeable future.
What do you think? I can't afford to do this kind of thing, but then, I rent an apartment and I'm into the whole "once I'm gone the world will forget I was ever here" thing. I find my complete irrelevance to the universe to be entirely invigorating.
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
My parents house is a 19th century farmhouse in Ireland. The walls are unshaped stone (just the faces are finished)and mortar. They are three feet, (yes 1 meter) thick. There is a 3 feet thick dividing wall in the center of the house running between the back wall and the front wall.
The roof beams are old ships masts and a lot of the other timbers were ships timbers.
The foundation is on bedrock.
It's survived a gas cooker explosion (which took out 2 windows and the kitchen cabinets, but the floors and the walls never moved), several huge storms over the last century and a lot of floods.
Building houses that way today does cost a fortune. For a start you can't get good timber anymore - most timber is kiln dried and doesn't seem to age as well as the timber that was stored for 20 or 30 years to dry naturally.
It's also hard to find a builder who knows the principle of dry stone building. Most older Irish homes were built in the same style as drystone walls, except that mortar was also used.
Okay, I love stone as much or more than the next guy, but it's hardly necessary to build a house out of stone to get into the multi-hundred lifespan range. There are lots of houses in New England that are stick-frame homes with wooden clapboard siding that are >200 years old.
There are numerous threats to a house's longevity:
1) Weather
2) Pests (insects, mice, etc.)
3) insufficient maintenance
4) Problems such as earthslides, earthquakes, settling, tree roots damaging foundations, etc.
This is off the top of my pointy head, so I'm sure there are categories I'm not thinking of right now.
Okay, so we know that you can get a stick-frame, non-stone house to last for multiple hundreds of years. How to PLAN for that is another matter.
First, take the weather and your local area into account. Prone to earthquakes? In a flood plain? Loose soil? Soil that drains poorly? On a hillside? Design accordingly! Many of these are foundation design issues and can be designed around. I'd stay away from the flood plain, though.
Next, once you've got your design TYPE planned, make sure your builder is doing to use appropriate engineering to achieve the design requirements. These include new types of roofing materials, roofing support design (big issue in Hurricane-areas - make sure your roof SUPPORTS can take it). Make sure your roofing system can 'breathe' if that's what it needs. The roofing material needs to be matched to the correct roof support system - cheap builders don't care, but this is what can cause massive roofing problems a few decades down the road, depending on weather in your area. Make sure your soil drains properly. Make sure your foundation is sealed properly. Make sure your windows are correctly installed (and skylights are even more problematic), and installed correctly for YOUR type of wall/roof system. Make sure your house is designed properly for your site - what type of sun/wind/rain do you get in that area? Make sure your window & skylight placement is proper. On the coast? Make sure higher salt content & moisture content in the air is taken into account for ALL materials used. Moisture-resistent drywall. Wood that comes in contact with concrete/stone/earth needs to be treated properly. Don't use wood shingles if you've ever heard of 'fire'. Live in a forest area that is prone to fires? Design accordingly (have a swimming pool - backup water source for dousing house down).
Maintenance. Learn what all the systems in your house would require, and make sure you've got the wherewithall to make that happen. Maintenance costs money, so build that into your accounting. Making your house's internal environment have a fairly consistent temperature/humidity level will go a long way to making wood and drywall last much longer. If your roof needs work, get it done RIGHT AWAY. Same thing for plumbing, electrical, and foundation systems. These are your critical priority systems to maintain, as they can impact everything else in very bad (expen$ive) ways. If your architect & builder are smart, they can minimize the amount of plumbing needed (designing house to that, say, kitchen, bathrooms, etc. share as many walls as possible. A good builder can make things like 'wet walls' (remember the Matrix?) where service people can get access to normally hidden things like plumbing, etc. Having to bust through a drywall to get to hidden plumbing really blows.
Make sure everything is vented properly (bathrooms, oven hoods, etc.) - that helps make things more livable. Make sure you spend the money for the good windows that tilt in so you can easily clean things and INSPECT them. Getting cheap stuff that isn't easily accessible is probably not a good idea in the long run.
Flooring - radiantly heat that floor! Very nice technology.
Zone heating/cooling - a great idea, but having vastly differing temperatures in adjoining rooms makes me nervous. I've seen no anecdotal evidence of this being a problem, though houses with zone heating/cooling
You may have the impression that concrete is a modern material. It isn't.
The Romans used concrete extensively, there are a number of several hundred year old concrete buildings.
How long it lasts is down to the building design. Fundamentally, it has to be flexible and low cost to run. People pull down buildings because they become expensive to operate and difficult to use.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Absolutely!
Dyolf Knip
Houses built of wood 100's of years ago are still standing and our wood products now are much stronger/better.
... the upshot is that housing material is worse and construction is shoddier than in the past.
I don't think that's true. An architect friend of mine once mentioned (and I'm quoting from memory so I'll have to paraphrase) that houses built in the 20's will last for 110 years, in the 50s for 80 years, 70s for 50 years and most modern houses 30 years. It was something like that
"Teachers leave us kids alone
Well, since you started the wood vs. steel idea, here's 2 cents from this Civil Engineer:
.9 (permanent) instead of the more common Cd = 1.0 (10 years)
Tips for good timber construction:
Don't use a residential contractor. Use a comercial building contractor. They are used to having people check their quality, and do better work. However, you're going to pay for it.
Insist on good lumber.#2 spruce-fir is good for sawhorses and houses that only last a few decades.
Make sure the Engineer uses Cd =
Glulam and other laminate beams are good. beleive the hype. The problem with most solid sawn timber is the quality since we've used all the old growth. Glulam is a step back towards that quality.
The big problem with steel studs will be corrosion.
They come electroplated or zinc dipped. some are punched and formed _after_ plating, leaving unprotected edges. You then go and poke holes in them with screws, and leave corrosion points. If you go with steel, use bolts in pre-primed holes and paint over the bolt heads.
If you go with concrete, use galvanized rebar. You'll shit a kidney when you see the cost, but it's the best thing since, well, rebar. Bar corrosion and the ensuing spalling is what will eventually weaken your foundation.
Personally, I've been doing some thinking about the house I want to build/ have built when I retire:
concrete foundation, doweled stone walls, glulam and bolt trusses (damn near no structural walls or columns in the envelope), Granite roof.
I think I need a new sig here.
Raised conduit will only look like a "cross between a prison cell and a boiler room" if you don't make an effort to make it otherwise.
Let's say that instead you put in an inch deep baseboard covering a two inch deep recessed channel. The baseboard, since it will be unusually visible, will be oak or other material chosen to look pretty and age well. A matched crown molding with tapered base fills it in. If a third horizontal is done in the form of a chair rail then there is plenty of room to run anything that we have reason to know to foresee.
Since many of the approaches mentioned here would work best with nine foot or taller ceilings, all of this should be nicely in proportion. If, as I suggest further down, window seats, shelving, and other such things are built in out of matching materials, then the room should actually look quite pretty.
A few things to keep in mind:
-All conduit should be attached with brass or other ornamental nuts and bolts. No nails, no hidden connections. This reduces the risk of some nitwit cutting into the baseboard or other conduit because they can't see that it was meant to be removable. Best case scenario would be to have a few small places in the house where vertical conduits have small glass windows so that people can see that stuff is running inside.
-Verticals could be made to look mock-tudor or some other style that typically has visible beams and supports.
-"Spiking" the inside of the surfacing with thin, long ceramic rods might be a good idea. This, again, is meant to reduce the odds of some ignorant future person just starting to slash away. Nothing like hitting industrial ceramic in what seems to be wood to get a person's attention.
- Color code the various types of things running through the conduit with lots of labels in more then one language.
I can't say that crazyphilman's approach is quite mine. But I can see the viability of it.
Rustin
Data is the lever, rigor the fulcrum, brains the force that drives it all.
Two words:
Regular Maintenance
The longer you let it go, the more nature reclaims it. You have to plan to fight entropy continuously.
I took a tour in the NE US a few years ago and the guide told us, "Our ancestors built these buildings with the intent that thay would last hundreds of years!" There was a crew on scaffolding against one building tuck-pointing all the mortar on one wall.
I pointed out to the guide that if it wasn't for the regular replacement of the mortar, none of these building would have lasted 50 years. His response was, "Yeah, but they were smart enough to build these buildings so that we _could_ replace the mortar."
I thought it was a stupid answer at the time but later I realized that he was right. They didn't build things they couldn't repair, replace or maintain.
I have friends that live in a 170 year old, wood frame house. Of course, the banister was replaced sometime in the 1920's and the oak posts in the cellar were changed to steel in the 1960's and several steps have been replaced and the siding's been replaced several times and the chimneys have been rebuilt,... you get the idea.
But, it's still considered a 170 year old house even though probably less than half of it is actually 170 years old.
My point is, structures that are maintained, last. Those that are not maintained, don't. It doesn't really matter what material you build with, if you don't or can't maintain it, it isn't going to last anyway.
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