81–90 of 292 posts
He isn't even wearing a hard hat. That's an OSHA violation. I watch the video about him installing the stairs, and I cringed half the time. The guy is very close to injuring or killing himself.
In my country houses are built with concrete, much easier with wood.
Back in the 50s, my great grandfather built the house where my mother and my grandmother grew up in all by himself. It took him 6 years, but he had no help. He started digging into the ground with a shovel. He was a carpenter and bricklayer and used his spare time and skill to do it. This house is still standing and my grandmother still lives in it. This is him with his wife, my great grandmother: https://i.imgur.com…
In my hometown it was very common for people to build their own house twenty years ago, ignoring all kind of permits. A lot of people worked in construction or were plumbers, painters... they worked patiently in the weekends and with a little help from friends, only sprinting at the moment of the concrete injection. Even if the houses were illegal (there's an interesting background on why people takes that risk) the…
> there's an interesting background on why people takes that risk At least in some cases, the reason was that paying the fine was quicker and maybe even cheaper than going through the municipal bureaucracy. People would even denounce themselves once the construction was finished.
The town had plenty of land available. Data here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiclana_de_la_Frontera
But unless you owned 1 ha, regulations required an urbanization project. There weren't enough of them to cover a population that doubled in fifty years.
It looks like the entire thing is made of chipboard and planks of wood? Is it a temporary building? How long does that last?
This is how Americans build houses. And they sell them more expensively than the massive houses we build in Europe.
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Cool to see this! Most people will never build their own home these days (even with the cost savings).
A problem is that you can't get a mortgage to build it yourself. Being cheaper in the end doesn't help you if you don't have the money right now.
In India, we mostly build using 100% concrete no woods -- I don't know why this difference.
Impressive! Of course technically he’s building it not by himself but with the help of a lot of technology. ;) This man is building a house including the tools you need to build that house completely by himself: Primitive Technology: Tiled Roof Hut https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P73REgj-3UE
Primitive Technology is an awesome channel, one of the marvels of youtube. To anybody who decides to follow his videos: please do not skip reading the description of the videos. He's not just making some primitive-looking stuff with crap he finds about, he actually often tries to replicate what actual primitive peoples did, and explains the historical period and some other details. There are those other channels that…
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That only answers one half of the question, doesn't it? Germany should also have the same unlimited supply of timber (it has the same percentage of forests of their land area), so why don't Germans build wood houses?
Stone houses last longer. Whenever I see a report about a tornado or a hurricane in the US I wonder what the damage would be like if people had stone houses instead of wooden houses that disintegrate during a storm and then in turn damage other houses. It reminds me of the Kessler Syndrome.