I dont know why they have to lie about it. At $5/8ft board you’d think I paid for the full 1.5. Edit: I mixed up nominal with actual.
I dont know why they have to lie about it. At $5/8ft board you’d think I paid for the full 1.5. Edit: I mixed up nominal with actual.
To someone from central europe it’s always weird how houses get build from wood in the US. 😅 I imagine you can hear ~everything happening ~anywhere in the house?
Depends. The cheap houses, yeah, there’s as fair bit of noise, but you can’t hear everything. From downstairs, you can hear when someone walks across the room above you, but not when they’re walking in other upstairs rooms. And from rooms on the same level, you can hear if someone is talking loudly in the room next door, but not enough to make out what they’re saying unless they’re yelling.
Well-built houses or buildings made for occupancy by multiple families usually have better sound insulation between the rooms/floors/units, so it’s not always an issue.
Edit: the plus side to that is I know all the noises my house makes at night, so as a light sleeper, I know when something is wrong in the middle of the night, and I only need one decent sound system for the whole house, which is great for listening to records while doing housework.
Not really, unless the house was built incredibly cheaply with thin studs and crappy drywall.
Wood is pretty decent at blocking sound – it the voids between the studs that’s an issue. Filling them with sound deadening insulation solves that problem.
It’s not as good at blocking sound as a masonry wall obviously, but it’s “good enough” at a fraction of the price.
it’s extremely common for americans to dismiss apartments because they simply cannot fathom the idea of housing that actually blocks noise, it’s one of the primary arguments i see used against denser housing.
Yup. Over here in the Western US, nearly every apartment is built as cheaply as possible and run by slumlords that will do everything that they can to refuse to return deposits. Painting over bugs and black mold between tenants is the norm, in my experience, not the exception. Add to that that insulation between apartments is scant, if present and frequently there are no physical barriers between apartment building attic accesses (in every top-story apartment that I’ve been in, it would be easily possible to gain access to others’ apartments via the attic and the attics also act to channel sound between all top apartments).
It’s a big improvement from making them from straw.
I spent a few nights in a straw bale home, wanting to experience what they were like. They are incredibly quiet. Each bale is 1.5 ft of soundproofing/insulation. The loudest part of the house was the clock ticking. The house was heated by appliances such as the refrigerator and water heater. A local monastery built several to rent out for people wanting a tranquil contemplation.
I want to say that stick-built homes are really not so fragile as people seem to think. There’s tradeoffs, of course, and ways to build them that make them uncomfortable at best and blatantly unsafe at worst. That being said, they’re pretty sturdy, fairly easy to repair and modify, and relatively quick and cheap to build.