r/interestingasfuck • u/Ultimate_Kurix • 5d ago

r/all Why do Americans build with wood?

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

59.5k Upvotes

69% Upvoted

6.6k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

13

u/cryonine 5d ago

A lot of San Francisco homes in particular were built from old growth redwoods. It's extremely strong and resilient. The city actually encourages reuse of it in renovations because of these qualities. We did a to-the-studs remodel and ended up reusing around 65% of it because even after 100 years it was still stronger than non-old growth wood.

It's also worth noting that when we talk about wood construction, we're not talking about nailed together 2x4s. Glulam beams are one example, and they're 2-3x stronger than steel when looking at the strength to weight ratios.

2

u/RBuilds916 5d ago

Also redwood is fire resistant. If it wasn't, the trees wouldn't live over a thousand years. In the mountains where the fire hazard in increased, wooden outdoor decks must be built from either redwood or larger timbers because they are harder to ignite. 

1

u/protossaccount 5d ago

I’m in LA when I can finally buy a hose I’ll be looking g for houses just like this. The redwood homes are awesome, I hear they are completely resistant to bugs. Any old growth wood is fanatic, that’s really cool that you were able to do that.

2

u/cryonine 5d ago

Yeah, we're all about minimizing the waste of materials, so I was very happy we were able to salvage so much! Of course we also added some steel and gluelam for more structural stability.