by Billy » Mon Sep 08, 2014 4:20 am
Another thing to consider is how the building was originally constructed.
Our little farmhouse here is over 100 years old, built in the Arts & Crafts style. Built like a bunker. Thick hardwood joists and beams, usually oak or southern yellow pine (a species of pine almost as hard as oak, now almost extinct). Plaster walls. Everything morticed and tenoned, then cross-pinned. All that won't stop a window from being smashed in by the occasional flying tree branch in a storm, but these old homes were overbuilt. Some were even built using square cut nails, which have 400% more holding power than wire-cut nails.
Newer homes are made from soft white pine and spruce, tacked together using what are referred to as "spikes" - No. 16 nails. In the past, the land was cleared and if the trees were suitable, they were sawed up and left to dry and normalize on the build site for up to a year. The wood was also quarter sawn, not slab-sawn like today. This means that when quarter sawn wood dried out, it remained relatively straight. Slab sawn wood does not. When it dries out, it warps and curls - this is just the wood wanting to return to it's natural shape. Compounding the issue is that a company building a house uses wood that is "soaking wet and green"... meaning it has been partially dried in a kiln, but not normalized (wood will gain or lose water, depending on the relative humidity of it's surroundings, which affects its dimensions). This wood is cut and tacked together before the wood has a chance to normalize, and over the course of a year or two - as the wood changes dimensions - the house creaks like a pirate ship. Wood changing dimension also loosens the nails holding the boards together. Whenever you hear someone say "Oh, that's just the house settling" what they really mean is "Oh, the builders skimped on the materials and used wet sticks to build the house". I've been in some homes where the molding is just paper with a wood grain plastic covering over it... it swells when wet and disintegrates...
Modern houses won't last very long if nobody maintains them. Old houses, if reasonably maintained during their lives, will last longer just because of the superior construction and materials that went into them from the beginning.
One of the potential house-killers around here is the black locust tree. Not a big fan. Certain trees colonize newly cleared areas - the black locust is one. They grow fast, are extremely hard, invasive, rot relatively quickly and a stiff wind often knocks them over. One of my neighbors has an old home on his property - the structure is more or less intact, though damaged. The invasive vegetation has taken its toll more than the elements. Vines, ivy, locust trees, etc, are doing their best to knock that old house down, but it's hanging on. My guess is that it was built sometime in the middle of the 19th century, judging by the type of glass still visible...
“Life is slavery if the courage to die is absent.” - Seneca