Our evolving home
They don't build them the way they used to - and sometimes that's a good thing.
By JUDY STARK, Times Homes Editor
© St. Petersburg Times
published October 5, 2002
Who hasn't gazed at a Craftsman bungalow, a Federal-style townhouse, a New England saltbox or a pillared Southern mansion and bemoaned the loss of fine architectural style, the use of sturdy natural building materials and painstaking hand-created detail?
It's easy to forget what those houses didn't have. Central heat. Insulation. Air conditioning. Indoor plumbing. Our nostalgia for the past shouldn't blind us to the fact that yesterday's home was often downright uncomfortable to live in. People who dream about living in Great-Grandpa's gingerbread Victorian will be the first to scream after the fuses (remember fuses?) blow when someone turns on a hair dryer.
It's not as easy as saying, "Old is bad, new is good."
"There are houses 150 years old that are as plumb and straight and weathertight as the day they were built," said Tim Carter, a Cleveland building contractor and syndicated columnist. His "Ask the Builder" column appears in the Homes section each Saturday. "And there are houses that are 15 years old that are falling down."
In 1900, the typical home was a two-story house of 700 to 1,200 square feet, with two or three bedrooms and one or no bathrooms. The average cost of a home was less than $5,000 at a time when the median family income was $490 a year.
Today, that house has ballooned to 2,000 square feet or more, with three bedrooms, 21/2 baths, a garage for two or more cars, central air conditioning and a fireplace. The average cost is about $200,000, and median family income is more than $45,000.
As the accompanying graphic shows, there are plenty of pluses and minuses, tradeoffs and accommodations to be made in comparing old homes and new.
Talking walls
If these walls could talk, what would they say? A building 75 or 100 years old would say that much of the labor was done by hand, one house at a time -- a boutique style of building. It would tell us that the technological systems we demand today -- electrical, plumbing, air conditioning -- either didn't exist or existed in a much less sophisticated form.
The homes we typically see in new subdivisions send a message of speed, efficiency and commodity. Where a home yesterday was created from components built onsite -- doors, windows, cabinets, walls -- today all these elements are created elsewhere and assembled onsite. It would also send a message of the triumph of chemistry and physics: synthetic materials that increase energy efficiency, ease the burden on natural resources such as wood and stone and often closely replicate the original and natural: engineered lumber, laminate flooring, solid-surface materials, coatings and adhesives, fasteners and wraps. Of course, some of those are petroleum-based, imposing an added burden on a nonrenewable resource.
It would also send the message of the importance of speed and ease in the building process. Turn through the pages of Building Products magazine, a trade journal for the construction industry, and the message over and over again is: faster, easier installation. No special tools. Low maintenance. Prefinished surfaces. One-person installation. No callbacks. High performance.
Between 30 and 40 percent of the cost of a building today typically is spent on air conditioning, electrical and plumbing systems, says St. Petersburg architect Tim Clemmons. "A hundred years ago we weren't spending 30 to 40 percent on those things. I would argue that the percentage of funds that used to go into the architecture has been diverted into the technological systems. We get something for that: better lighting, the comfort of air conditioning, plumbing convenience. But it also means that the base building may not be built as well, or built to last as long."
The story the walls are telling us is also a story of how society is organized: cost and availability of labor, skill levels, the architectural styles that are in or out of favor, the materials that are available, what buyers are willing to spend their money on. Reducing cycle time -- building the house faster -- is the goal, since time is money, and a builder wants to get that house off his books and onto the buyer's as quickly as possible. Given a choice of adding hurricane safety features to their homes or opting for the wet bar or granite countertops, homeowners go for the show every time, builders say.
It's typically the true custom home -- today's boutique building, where cost is not the primary consideration -- that uses natural materials such as wood and stone and where attention and time are lavished on details.
The inside story
They don't build 'em the way they used to, and sometimes that's good, sometimes that's bad. Here's a look at some building components and materials of yesterday and today.
Modern building materials allow greater flexibility. Engineered lumber (thin plies, or layers, of lumber bonded with adhesives and engineered for the span it will cross or the weight it will bear) bridges longer distances than sawn lumber, opening up the interiors of homes for the spacious living areas homebuyer want. "It's stronger, straighter and less costly, and it saves trees," said St. Petersburg architect Timothy R. Rhode, who often works on older homes.
Moldings and ceiling medallions made from polyurethane or resin that exactly replicate the hand-worked wood or plaster moldings of yesteryear put elaborate architectural detail within almost anyone's price range and can be installed in a matter of hours.
Fiber-cement exterior siding (Hardieboard is one brand) is virtually indistinguishable from wood and resists pests and rot.
An all-wood door is a beautiful thing; the downside is that it can warp, swell, splinter and rot. Steel and fiberglass doors don't. Some materials simply don't stand up well in Florida's harsh climate of heat, rain and saltwater: They become brittle, they fade, they decay.
Homes today are snugger and tighter, weatherstripped and insulated and encased in wind-repellent and water-repellent wraps. But the unintended consequence of those efforts to increase energy efficiency is that indoor air quality might be poor. Stale air and fumes and gases from synthetic fibers and coatings inside the home can't escape, which can lead to respiratory illnesses.
Offsite production has made a huge difference. "It used to take the better part of a day to hang a door properly," said Larry Zarker, a spokesman for the National Association of Home Builders Research Center in Upper Marlboro, Md. "Now you can prehang the door in a factory and ship it to the site, and it's a basic installation, making sure it's level and true. It's a tremendous efficiency improvement."
Homes of yesteryear were often inhospitable to all but the able-bodied. Narrow, steep staircases and doorways, bathrooms where a wheelchair could not turn, clawfoot tubs that were hard to get in and out of, and front steps made life difficult. Today's homes are not necessarily easier for the physically challenged or the aging.
The charming woodstoves or fireplaces of yesteryear made homes smoky or musty. Unvented gas heaters generated carbon monoxide.
One of the major changes in construction has been the near-universality of air conditioning. In 1971, just 36 percent of new homes were air-conditioned. Now 86 percent of all new homes are. "I can't imagine building without it," Zarker said.
Air conditioning opened the door to a variety of building materials and techniques we may think of as cheap, as "not as good as the way they used to do it," but they were simply not possible before air conditioning. In a damp, humid climate such as Florida's, wall-to-wall carpeting would quickly become mold-to-mold carpeting without air conditioning. No wonder our forebears used plaster walls; drywall and particleboard do not do well in moist environments.
Homes of yesteryear are often several steps behind the technology demands of their owners: not enough electrical outlets and phone jacks; not enough service to accommodate appliances; personal electronics and high-tech equipment; knob-and-tube wiring that, while not inherently dangerous, might be inadequate and impossible to insure. It can be hard to get into the house's innards to rewire.
Older homes were built before today's building codes, perhaps in the days when there were no codes. So they might be greatly overbuilt, or underbuilt. Remodeling contractors tell stories about opening up an older home and being astounded at how lightly constructed they are, yet they're still standing. Architect Clemmons recalls his amazement at finding only a 2-by-6 spanning 18 feet in an old building, but he notes that it was a 2-by-6 from a 100-year-old heart pine, which is much stronger than today's 20-year-old harvested trees. Even the strength tables architects and engineers use to make their calculations acknowledge the greater strength of wood in years gone by compared with the present.
Today's homes are at least more consistently built. The roofs of older homes may have been sheathed in boards made from heart pine fastened with nails, not staples; on the other hand, those homes likely lack hurricane straps and ties and gable-end bracing.
Architect Rhode mourns the loss of craftsmanship and the apprenticeship programs of yesteryear in which younger workers learned their skills from a master. (The industry as a whole is worried about where the construction workers of the future will come from: Florida faces a shortage of 46,000 workers by 2008, the Florida Home Builders Association predicts.)
He was about to lose an argument with the contractor who's working on a new home Rhode designed in the Old Northeast section of St. Petersburg. The owner can't afford real brick for the chimney, and the contractor wondered what Rhode thought about stucco brick. "I've got a problem with that," he said. "It's not really brick and I don't like to pretend it is. I'd rather be honest about what it is."
Zarker, the NAHB spokesman, acknowledged that building today "is a commodity rather than a boutique. It is more standardized and less craft-oriented. We see the industry moving toward a very skilled assembly operation. This isn't low-skill; it requires skill. We pay a lot of attention to the framing process . . . so once the house is framed correctly, everything else seems to fit nicely."
A major attraction of older homes is that they are in older, settled neighborhoods that have developed some character. When buyers visit a new development where the first homes are barely under construction and there's scarcely a tree in sight, it's hard to know what the place will really look like five years down the road, who will live there, whether the amenities and landscaping will turn out the way they look in the glossy brochures. When they visit an established neighborhood, it's all there before them. The neighborhood's past is a strong indicator of its future.
-- Sources: Larry Zarker, spokesman, and Charlotte Wade, senior research analyst, National Center for Seniors Housing Research, both at the National Home Builders Association Research Center; Housing at the Millennium (NAHB); Timothy R. Rhode, architect; Tim Carter, syndicated columnist and building contractor; Tim Clemmons, Clemmons Architecture.
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