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I asked a builder why this was, and he said that the lateral forces created by a slightly tilted window has just enough force to rip the entire side of a house clean off due to houses having the structural integrity of wet newspaper, which is the preferred construction method in the States
US people, dry your newspapers before building your houses!
can't tell if this is a troll or not. youre telling me people outside the states think we live in wet newspaper?
Well not wet newspaper exactly but I heard you have walls so thin the neighbours can hear your cell division
That's how we got classics like Shut up, little man!
Depends on where you live. The US is huge and has a wide variety of building codes. I personally never hear my neighbors
I mean it exists for sure, but not something people expect when moving in places. usually correlates to the cost and age. decibels wise, it's not too different than Europe imo. I lived in France and mother fuckers be yelling from their windows all day. I also lived in Germany and the walls are thick as shit, but mother fuckers have their windows open all day and yodelling. if you live near people, you'll hear them some way or another. renting in the US is also much simpler. fuck Germany's renting culture shit.
You've... you've never been out of your state, have you? 😂
People don't...shout at eachother out of windows! What sort of savage would do that?
Oh, the ones in the movies you watched about Yurp. 😂
Hitting a wall and having any chance of the wall breaking isn't really a thing outside the US. Everyone elsewhere notices that a lot in movies and videos. It's not uncommon for children outside America to ask adults why Americans have paper walls. People being mad and punching a wall and putting a fist-sized hole in it, falling and breaking the wall or throwing anything and the thing getting stuck in the wall. In most of the world it's you or the thing hitting the wall that'll break, not the wall itself.
To clarify, the paper (and rock underneath it) are not the structural part of the house, they just cover the actual structural parts (the studs) and provide a pocket to fill with insulation.
The wall isn't the structural integrity part of the house. And that's for interior walls. You're getting your opinions from the questions that children ask in other countries?
It's an intentional exaggeration, but it's true that houses in the US are usually built without a proper foundation and with thin walls.
They're built differently depending on where you live in the states and your environment. I know y'all love staying ignorant to feel superior but this one is still pretty dumb. People in Japan practically have paper walls and I don't see you guys all up your snobby butts about that. Xenophobic turds. It would take people 10 seconds to learn why some of our houses are built the way they are but they won't bother if they haven't by now because they prefer the ignorance.
You're taking this a bit too seriously, man. It's like when we joke about the British having fucked up teeth. Just ribbing each other.
You know that tool called stud finder that you use in America if you ever think about hanging a picture on the wall, or a TV, otherwise you risk your wall falling down with anything attached to it?
Never seen a stud finder in Europe.
It's preferred because it's cheap.
Nobody wants to pay a stone mason to put brick on the exterior of their homes. They used timber for a long time, but now all the new houses I've seen use the metal studs, which sounds great on paper until you realize it's basically sheet metal stamped into a U kind of shape that's the same size as a 2x4. It's enough to hold up the drywall and maybe some pictures/paintings on the wall plus the occasional wall-mounted TV, but give it a couple hundred pounds of weight and it's going to crumple into itself like aluminum foil.
Honestly, most of the strength in the wall is now because of the drywall. The "studs" just keep them from falling over.
Not saying timber was all that much better, but it could at least support someone standing on the top plate of a wall without folding in on itself.
Can I get my house built from concrete board instead?
I wish I could have a stone masonry building. My friend's family used to own a hotel built by a stone mason. He invited us out to watch the company who bought it try to demolish it. Apparently they weren't expecting proper brick and mortar to be so strong.
Yep, and a lot of modern brickwork isn't designed to be structural, so many of the components used are basically poor substitutes for the "real deal" so to speak.
Stonework can be the strongest part of the building, or just little more than a facade.
In a nearby town, the second story brickwork of a building came off of the structure and fell into the sidewalk and road. I don't believe anyone was hurt, but the point is, sometimes, the brickwork is little more than just a wall. Other times, it's basically keeping the building upright. In that case, the building didn't go anywhere after losing the brickwork.
I'm sure in your example, the brickwork was providing the primary support structure for the building, and it was built far better than what fell off of the building in my example.
Lol! Imagine thinking this is true.
Lol imagine reading this as a true statement. Fiction books must fuck you right up 😂
Bro read War of the Worlds and started prepping his bunker
Can you please explain to me exactly why and how it was objectively obvious that OP's comment was meant to be taken as some kind of joke or satire?
Because if you can't, I have to think that you are little more than an arbitrarily condescending piece of shit.
Ok, I'll walk you through it. I am OP btw
I believe the basic structure is called a "bait and switch", a fairly common writing trick
I asked a builder why this was, and he said that the lateral forces created by a slightly tilted window
This is the "bait" bit. It sounds like a real comment so far
has just enough force to rip the entire side of a house clean off
This is the part where, if you didn't have the reading comprehension of a six month old duck, you'd start to realise that, perhaps this wasn't a serious comment. There's no way a slightly tilted window is ripping the entire side of a house off, surely? That's the "switch"
due to houses having the structural integrity of wet newspaper,
This line is pretty much only there as a setup to the next line. Houses, I'm sorry to inform you, do not have the structural integrity of wet newspaper. That would be as dangerous as it is impractical
which is the preferred construction method in the States
This bit, unsurprisingly, isn't exactly true either
I hope, now that I've broken the comment into its constituant parts, that you're rolling on the floor, clutching your aching ribs and laughing tears of joy.
Explaining jokes always makes them far funnier
In this case it's true, I am laughing more at this than the actual joke (which I also laughed at). This back and forth was the setup and the explanation is the punchline.
It's like when Americans say British people have fucked up teeth. I don't actually believe that, I just say it to make British people mad.
Mocking our construction is a European joke that they love because it makes Americans mad. Simple as