Cost of living/quality of life/best place for kids -- US vs UK
Oct 5th 2016, 12:41 pm
#76
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Location: Near Lynchburg Tennessee, home of Jack Daniels
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Re: Cost of living/quality of life/best place for kids -- US vs UK
You are correct but ddsprh did hint at a few truths - American houses are built as cheaply as possible, even the fairly expensive ones.
British houses are built the way they are, to a fair degree, because of the availability of materials, as is usually true in all countries around the world. Britain has lots of clay for making bricks, and ample limestone for cement and concrete, but, historically at least, relatively few pine trees for timber. Britain is also small and so while bricks are heavy to move, they don't have to be moved far to get them to where the houses are being built. Whereas America is big and has many trees.
In dismissing two layers of brick as having an insulation value of R2, I suspect that ddsrph is not allowing for the 2" air gap in the cavity wall. Of course insulating the gap improves the insulation, and to Yellowroom, my mother had her house insulated a few years ago, after my father died. She didn't tell me, perhaps because she knew my father was opposed to filling the wall cavity and thought I might have agreed with him. I only found out because the day the foam was being installed was the day that the Google Street View car drove past.
But back to the reason that ddsrph brought this topic up, American houses are soft and squishy compared to British houses which don't flex and bounce like timber-framed houses. British houses are also quieter, compared to hollow-walled American houses.
When we get around to having a custom home built, it will somewhat resemble what ddsrph has described he is having built - at least 6" timber walls (I am actually thinking of 8" walls), thicker masonry veneer, insulation in all walls - even the interior ones, and in the ceilings between floors, so as to deaden the noise transfer, and all floors will be two layers of subfloor, and the subfloor will be plywood, not OSB. Windows will be low-e and triple-glazed. ....
British houses are built the way they are, to a fair degree, because of the availability of materials, as is usually true in all countries around the world. Britain has lots of clay for making bricks, and ample limestone for cement and concrete, but, historically at least, relatively few pine trees for timber. Britain is also small and so while bricks are heavy to move, they don't have to be moved far to get them to where the houses are being built. Whereas America is big and has many trees.
In dismissing two layers of brick as having an insulation value of R2, I suspect that ddsrph is not allowing for the 2" air gap in the cavity wall. Of course insulating the gap improves the insulation, and to Yellowroom, my mother had her house insulated a few years ago, after my father died. She didn't tell me, perhaps because she knew my father was opposed to filling the wall cavity and thought I might have agreed with him. I only found out because the day the foam was being installed was the day that the Google Street View car drove past.
But back to the reason that ddsrph brought this topic up, American houses are soft and squishy compared to British houses which don't flex and bounce like timber-framed houses. British houses are also quieter, compared to hollow-walled American houses.
When we get around to having a custom home built, it will somewhat resemble what ddsrph has described he is having built - at least 6" timber walls (I am actually thinking of 8" walls), thicker masonry veneer, insulation in all walls - even the interior ones, and in the ceilings between floors, so as to deaden the noise transfer, and all floors will be two layers of subfloor, and the subfloor will be plywood, not OSB. Windows will be low-e and triple-glazed. ....
In older British houses with no interior framing how do they run electrical wiring?
Oct 5th 2016, 1:04 pm
#77
Joined: Dec 2001
Location: Dixie, ex UK
Posts: 52,439
Re: Cost of living/quality of life/best place for kids -- US vs UK
), I increased the numbers of sockets, including some high on the wall for a wall-mounted TV, and chiselled all the back boxes and conduits into the walls. 
..... I did the work myself, so the cost of labour wasn't an issue, and I wasn't married, so living in a building site wasn't an issue either. 
The work I did included relaying the floorboards, so I had access to the floor voids upstairs and down. The floor at the top of the stairs served as a "junction box" for cables heading in all directions to the bedrooms and also to the water heater cupboard in the bathroom where they threaded their way up into the attic for the bedroom lights. I actually turned the floor at the top of the stairs into a hinged hatch, with counter-sunk hinges, a wire "handle" that laid in a groove I chiselled, and a couple of screws to hold it down. Any future wiring work will be much easier to do. "Unfortunately" my creative improvements are hidden under the carpet, so will be a hidden surprise for future owners.
Last edited by Pulaski; Oct 5th 2016 at 1:11 pm.
Oct 5th 2016, 4:25 pm
#81
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Location: Near Lynchburg Tennessee, home of Jack Daniels
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Re: Cost of living/quality of life/best place for kids -- US vs UK
Pulaski
When I was planning to build I looked at all options that would be OK for the development. The online research kept coming back to several articles by a group called"Building Science". They have several articles I found very helpful. For your plan one thing to remember is wood is a killer on R value and you don't want any wood framed walls touching the masonary walls. That is why it works great to place a three inch thick XPS (extruded poly styrene) sheet against the block wall then frame tight against that. Continuous insulation, that is unterrupted by wood gets a much higher r value and in this case also provides a vapor barrier for the wood framing. The codes even specify that r 10 continuous is equal to r 13 interrupted by stud framing.
I also wired and plumbed the new house. Like you I kept the wiring to a minimum in the exterior walls to not disrupt the insulation.
When I was planning to build I looked at all options that would be OK for the development. The online research kept coming back to several articles by a group called"Building Science". They have several articles I found very helpful. For your plan one thing to remember is wood is a killer on R value and you don't want any wood framed walls touching the masonary walls. That is why it works great to place a three inch thick XPS (extruded poly styrene) sheet against the block wall then frame tight against that. Continuous insulation, that is unterrupted by wood gets a much higher r value and in this case also provides a vapor barrier for the wood framing. The codes even specify that r 10 continuous is equal to r 13 interrupted by stud framing.
I also wired and plumbed the new house. Like you I kept the wiring to a minimum in the exterior walls to not disrupt the insulation.
Oct 5th 2016, 4:40 pm
#82
Lost in BE Cyberspace
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Location: Portlandia Metro
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Re: Cost of living/quality of life/best place for kids -- US vs UK
Brick doesn't stand up well to earthquakes. I would rather be in a wooden house than a brick house during a quake.
Oct 5th 2016, 5:07 pm
#84
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Re: Cost of living/quality of life/best place for kids -- US vs UK
The UK seems to fair better in this respect apart from floods.
Oct 5th 2016, 5:20 pm
#85
Joined: Dec 2001
Location: Dixie, ex UK
Posts: 52,439
Re: Cost of living/quality of life/best place for kids -- US vs UK
We have no concerns about those here. There is no history of anything other than very localized flooding, basically overflowing creeks. There was a hurricane in 1988, and it was so unprecedented that it made history; it was a category 1, and knocked over a few trees. The last reported tornado I remember near us pulled the guttering off a grocery before meandering across the parking lot and into a field, tornadoes in this area typically pull off a few roofing shingles or remove branches from trees, they are the same as ones that occur in the UK occasionally, and are not at all like the tornadoes experienced between the Rockies and the Appalachians, or even tornadoes south of here in South Carolina, Alabama or Mississippi.
Oct 6th 2016, 3:09 am
#87
Austin. TX.
Joined: Sep 2013
Posts: 5,930
Re: Cost of living/quality of life/best place for kids -- US vs UK
Kiddoes and I were talking about this the other night. Austin does pretty well. It's hilly so the canyons/creeks quickly rise and that causes localised flash flooding but we couldn't think of anything else. Our house is woodframe but mostly brick on the outside and it seems pretty solid. Not like the scottish one which had 23 inch thick solid stone walls and was 130 years old about 20 years ago.
Oct 6th 2016, 7:36 am
#88
Lost in BE Cyberspace
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Re: Cost of living/quality of life/best place for kids -- US vs UK
There are far more areas without floods than with floods in the UK and nowhere near as bad as some parts of the US. The US already has the first climate refugees because of flooding.
Oct 6th 2016, 2:12 pm
#89
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Joined: Dec 2009
Location: Gaadnah MA
Posts: 597
Re: Cost of living/quality of life/best place for kids -- US vs UK
Again the problem is comparing like for like I guess (London vs Bay area or NYC). On the quality of life issue, a lot of my Generation (Y) in the UK seem to be stuck in a 'generation rent' style situation. Property ownership (in general) seems to be a lot more achievable here and that makes a big difference to quality of life; having a house you can change to how you want it and a couple of acres as a blank canvas. Moving back to the UK and having to massively downsize while paying massively more for a mortgage seems unthinkable - but you never know.
Oct 6th 2016, 2:28 pm
#90
Lost in BE Cyberspace
Joined: Feb 2013
Posts: 6,148
Re: Cost of living/quality of life/best place for kids -- US vs UK
Again the problem is comparing like for like I guess (London vs Bay area or NYC). On the quality of life issue, a lot of my Generation (Y) in the UK seem to be stuck in a 'generation rent' style situation. Property ownership (in general) seems to be a lot more achievable here and that makes a big difference to quality of life; having a house you can change to how you want it and a couple of acres as a blank canvas. Moving back to the UK and having to massively downsize while paying massively more for a mortgage seems unthinkable - but you never know.
