For normal construction tasks, I don't care one bit about this one bit. And you shouldn't either.

We've found more sustainable ways to quickly grow trees and use machines to turn them into usable construction lumber. This is amazing! Basic construction doesn't need to have the finest, densest, knot-free lumber. It just needs to work and hold up for a useful lifetime. We don't use this lumber for windows or weather-exposed areas. It's placed neatly inside of your dry home and protected from the elements.

Combining multiple boards into a single, more stable board isn't unique to cheap new growth lumber. It's a technique that is even used with more expensive woods to produce a hybrid board that has better properties than could be easily achieved with a single board. Modern adhesives can be stronger than the wood itself, so the existence of a joint shouldn't scare people.

If you're doing a high end woodworking project, you're generally not using this type of wood anyway. You're picking a hardwood or one of the fancier softwoods.

I love old growth lumber and its properties, but modern construction lumber and the processes that produce it are a great accomplishment. Regardless, it doesn't matter because old growth lumber is a very finite resource and it's not repeatable to reproduce forever anyway.

The only thing about it that I care about is the sheer amount of time wasted as a kid standing around the lumber yard as my dad rummaged through the entire bin grumbling about how shit wood was these days, full of knots, not a straight board in sight, etc.

Well, yeah, dad, you (literally, he was a logger) cut down all the good shit!

Good shops will buy better grades and store it inside a warehouse instead of a yard. That's how you can get straight 20' 2x4s for making forms (or whatever).

For indoor structural construction, they're selling "kiln dried, 19% or below" Southern-Yellow-Pine or Spruce-Pine-Fir categories, specified in #2 quality grade or better. This SYP KD19 #2BTR mark or SPF KD19 #2BTR mark is lumber-industry-standard. It's stamped on the wood.

For outdoor construction like decks, they'll sell you copper-compound pressure treated wood which is indeed rather wet, and dyed green.

And then in a tiny section at the back, they'll sell you a single, large doug fir board green, as well as two SKUs of engineered LVL boards for bearing beams. Mostly you see Doug Fir more on the West Coast.

You can tell green / wet / fresh wood with a moisture meter, but you can also just pick it up - it will be up to four times as heavy.

KD19 is a maximum rating for structural uses. In reality they're often taking it significantly further than that in the kiln depending on the distributor (10%, 12%), but not quite as dry as the indoor of a house either. Drying distortion with KD19 is nonzero, but usually something small enough that you can ignore it with typical construction techniques. Large 2x12 SYP boards generate the most complaints, because the wood likes to warp more than others, and 2x12 is so large you're not going to get it sawn with a clean grain pattern.

How do you prepare those after buying before building?

Absolutely true, which is why I emphasized "intensive management on a small scale". This is rather unlike current forest governance schemes which are mostly "industrial management on a large scale".

Honestly, to do this right, you'd need a huge cultural shift towards living and working in a rural forest, along with direct local control and long-term strategic management. Which describes some forest-dwelling cultures of the past but very few today.

Wood is different. Each type of wood has its advantage and disadvantage. A pine tree is more different to a Maple tree than you are to a great white shark in the evolution chart.

If bamboo could be easily used to make SPF studs we'd be all over it - it's a $100B industry and bamboo grows extremely easily.

This is simply not true for use as a material for buildings, which is why it's used as a replacement for wood all across east asia.

But looks like it's ready to go for some applications (plywood). Hopefully they can get it thicker and replace more dimensional lumber. Or maybe I'm reading their site wrong?

Everything you've said is true for general construction, but the fine article is addressing windows specifically.

Of course, there are new mass timber builds, but those use wood that is heavily processed. I guess the lighter wood would need to be pressed more, to match the same resistance, but I suspect the costs are cheaper with wood grown faster.

I can safely say that there's little difference between a good wood frame and masonry house, today. Modern concrete isn't as long lasting as Roman concrete from 2000 years ago. Modern concrete doesn't play well with water.

You can use modern concrete without steel and build things about as good as Roman concrete. You'll pay a whole lot more than reinforced because you'll use at least 3x more concrete and limit the shape -- only arches. Compare Prague's Charles bridge[0] to Seattle's West Seattle bridge. Or compare the windows of the Roman Pantheon (uh, none) to those in any skyscraper.

You won't have as much self-healing in salt water as some Roman concretes. But modern concretes also have far more compressive strength.

You can still buy lime mortars and build brick masonry houses, if you want to pay for the labor; the materials themselves have never been cheaper.

[0] Yes I know it isn't Roman nor especially made of concrete but there's a lot of good information on its construction and it's basically the perfection of Roman-style bridge building, and without reinforcement you need to build just like that.

The wood frame will do better in an earthquake. The masonry will do better in a flood or high winds. Consider the natural disaster risks of your local area when picking a home.

Not all architects, to be clear, some really know their foundations but...

Wood lasts a shit tonne longer, assuming you maintain it.

The only thing really thats better is the thermal performance, and price.

It's completely untrue. I have PVC windows that after 30 years are as good as new. Before that there were two glaze wooden windows that after 10 years were horrible. Not sure how bad they were from the start.

> are massive,

I see you might make smaller window out of wood (or pvc) but you'd have to sacrifice thermal isolation quality to do it. They are large because they have air pockets in them for isolation.

> and are not structural, unless there are steel supports.

Load bearing window? That's insane idea as well.

> Wood lasts a shit tonne longer, assuming you maintain it.

Yeah, so not really, because people don't maintain things on average.

> The only thing really thats better is the thermal performance, and price.

Which are the two most important qualities for a window, plus the ease of use which is better for pvc and stays better.

Those are unlikely to be uPVC, which means that unless you've reconditioned them, they are uv damaged to fuck. (source: I lived on an estate with a mixture of glazing types.)

> They are large because they have air pockets in them for isolation.

They are large for structural reasons, Insulation is a side bonus. PVC isn't very rigid, so in order to provide some level of support and stop the glazing units drooping out of windows, the frame needs to be of a certain thickness. its not _solid_ for both cost, ease of production and thermal properties. Solid PVC has a uvalue of about 3-5 u depending on your thickness, which is normally better than most double glazing.

> Load bearing window? That's insane idea as well.

What do you think lintels are for? also, how do you think Bay windows work?

> The only thing really thats better is the thermal performance, and price.

I should have added qualified that with the following: installation cost, over 50 years you'll need to replace them twice, if not more.

also, in the UK at least newer glazing has to have vents in them which kneecaps thermal performance.

As did the musket.

But to be honest the rot resistance is more important. Most wood buildings fail because of rot issues, not because the wood wasn't strong enough.

If this was a modern house, it would be covered in 5 different layers of plastic with the intent on keeping any moisture out, then sheathed in OSB that basically sees water and just melts away. Like you said, there is no way to keep it all the way dry, but energy efficiency (and cheap materials and quick building techniques) have also driven a housing design that is so tight that if there is moisture intrusion, it's got no good way to vent out.

If you took a cross section of wall, and you have interior temp (20c) on the inside face of the wall and exterior temp on the outside face section of wall, somewhere inside that section you’re hitting the dew point and condensation will form.

Rain screens are mostly holes (empty space). That's how they allow drying of the exterior wall assembly.

> Unless you seal every fastener hole with some sealant that will last 100 years, which I'm pretty sure would be a magical product, I sincerely doubt a modern house will be standing as long as mine is.

Standing for 100 years isn't the sole metric of success of a house's envelope. There are many others: how much did it leak? how much energy did it consume to stay comfortable? how good was the air quality? what was the cost to maintain it? All of these have to be balanced and building science provides frameworks to achieve that.

Using modern materials while adhering to building science results in very long lasting buildings, far longer than most homes built in the last 50 years.

Solid wood, not using latex paints or wrap, allowing the house to breathe where it needs to, and you can still have an R60 wall.

Agreed that you can, but as you imply, at a very high cost, especially when you don't use modern sheet goods like plywood that not only impede air movement, but provide sheer/racking resistance unmatched by traditional nailed solid board walls.

> so this cheap, throwaway culture we’re in looks down on it.

Few can afford a custom built home, much less one with artisanal walls. If anything we have a culture that looks up to such artisanal buildings precisely because they are not accessible. Scalability is essential to any impactful building technology. The fact that plywood and OSB can be made at scale from low quality laminates and scraps was game changing.

> Solid wood, not using latex paints or wrap, allowing the house to breathe where it needs to, and you can still have an R60 wall.

An R60 wall perhaps, but one that leaks like a sieve. The leaking air will bring a lot of moisture and unconditioned air with it, which will in turn require a lot of energy to condition.

Sure, solid wood will be more resilient to that moisture than plywood/OSB, but the swelling and contraction will create more leaks.

There is a reason that for centuries people filled cracks in walls with any goopy substance they can find (mud, sap, tar, stucco). It's to stop those leaks. Modern vapor permeable but airtight house wraps (not latex) are just a continuation of that.

Also remember, the vast majority of houses built in 1824 didn’t survive either. For the ones that did it’s mostly down to maintenance.

Past there, I really like a timber framer who does YouTube called Mr. Chickadee, guy was a Marine who decided to live a simple life. He hand makes everything, but don't let the old timey hat and pants fool you, he's spent a ton of time thinking about how the old methods work and why, and picking through multiple cultures that have had old wooden structures that last hundreds or even thousands of years for the techniques he's using.

However, leaky houses probably contribute to their longevity as those areas are able to dry from the outdoor air flowing indoors instead of rotting.

Then you shouldn't have an issue since you are basically living outdoors most of the time.

As long as there is enough air movement, it should dry things out.

The problem is condensation inside the walls. To deal with that, your wall has to be vapor-open to either the inside or outside, so it can dry. Standard interior paint is usually breathable.

Also, if you are leaving your windows open that much in winter you probably consume a lot of heating fuel and therefore generate a lot of heat, which also dries things out. That's how it worked with old wood houses - you generated a ton of heat to dry them out.

Traditional wood houses in Scandinavia have tar and seem well preserved: is that usually enough, or did they survive because it’s so cold to six months a year that bugs don’t even try?

Old growth and just 'old' wood is naturally termite resistant because wood gets harder as it ages and the bugs just don't like to chew on it, they will look elsewhere. You don't see many 60+ year old houses getting new termite infestations unless it was in areas of recent repair (fascia boards, brick moldings). But if it's wet, it's softer to chew. It's always comes down to water.

For instance railroad ties were treated with creosote or tar. Similar for the underground part of telephone poles. There was a Copper-Chromium-Arsenic mix also that would kill bugs and mold but is extremely toxic, so isn't EPA approved anymore.

I would not want creosote or tar-treated wood in a house I live in, though. It's all toxic.

In the exterior-treated SPF (think what we use in America for a deck or exterior staircase) there's a durability limit to the rot resistance. And the wood is tough to restore.

Better woods (not necessarily old growth, just white pine or high quality cedar) are easier to restore. They also look nice, so people are more inclined to take care of them.

In the end, nothing lasts forever without maintenance.

Other methods of preventing rot exist such as charring the end of a post before sticking it in the ground, protecting end grain from contact with water, etc.

Another variable is how much the building moves. Being in an earthquake zone here in New Zealand makes me look at elaborate brick and stone buildings with a degree of nervousness.

There are definite benefits to modern techniques that are less resource intensive and protecting our remaining old growth forests is important, but we're sacrificing a lot of valuable properties as well.

All the lighter-weight joists made with OSB burn far faster than the 2x8s or whatever they replaced, and home furnishings are made with large amounts of flammable synthetics.

At a live-fire course I was on, the scenarios we worked on were fueled by stacks of wooden pallents, lit by an instructor's tiger torch. One of the instructors asked us if we knew the fuel equivalent of a typical love seat with synthetic foam, in pallets. We all figured it was lots, but not the real answer: NINETY.

https://www.nahb.org/-/media/NAHB/advocacy/docs/top-prioriti...

> As expected, the coefficient estimate for the percentage of houses built after 1989 (pctpost89) is negative and statistically significant. This implies that, in counties with newer housing stock, all else equal, the fire death rate is lower. Interestingly, when identical regressions to model 1 were run using different cutoff points for new stock, such as the percentage of houses built after 1979 or 1969 or 1959, the coefficients were of roughly similar size, were always negative, and the associated t-statistics were at least as significant.

The starting point of this though, was the idea that the materials in the house are actually better than in the past. To the extent that they'll tolerate fire longer before collapsing, they aren't, and the gases from the foam cushions, carpets and drapes are more toxic than ever. The reason this was drilled into our heads is that it means less time to get into a fire, and someone out, before we all have to leave for our own safety.

I am very surprised by this.

I'm sure that building codes ensure that the actual houses are more fire resistant. And fire fighting has probably come a long way.

But the typical home is full of processed plastic fabric. Which burns a whole heck of a lot faster than either cotton or wool. Carpet, curtains, clothes, furniture, etc.

The reasoning is that old growth lumber handles repeated compression better as they are denser, harder, and firmer. New growth timber is squishier due to it being softer with less tightly grouped growth rings.

At first I thought that made no sense, then I realized building a house out of sponges is not ideal. Fighting collapse is sometimes more about rigidity in the correct place rather than absorbing all shakiness everywhere.

What you won't see in the above is things that are hidden. Modern code requires you to have a firestop in all walls every 10 feet - old houses were often balloon framed which means the inside of the walls becomes a chimney in a fire and will help feed the fire. New houses the inside of walls do not become a chimney because of that fire stop.

Modern houses also are insulated to much better standards. Something else that often isn't seen but makes a big difference. Even when it is seen nobody thinks about it - those old windows the article is singing the praises of are universally single pane windows that should have been scrapped 40 years ago. Sure there frame is still like new, but the standards for new back then are not acceptable.

The bigger lesson to take from the above: don't build to last too long. What people want out of a house changes over time, and you never correctly anticipate what people will want in the next decade. Eventually that old house will have enough things "wrong" that cannot be retrofitted and the best thing to do is tear down and rebuild from scratch to modern standards.

Disagree.

Build to last long, but accomodate modification.

Old houses are built to last a very long time, because they weren't commodities being bought and sold on a 10 year timeframe. But old houses are also very difficult to modify. As you noted, no structural engineering, also lathe & plaster walls are a nightmare to take down, etc. etc.

I live in a house built before structural codes were made mandatory(1964) - and just yesterday we had to replace a third of the true 2x4s because they were rotten and a corner of the house was liable to just come crumbling down.

If you want more proof - look at the remains of civilizations that built primarily from wood... but there isn't much to look at at all!

For instance, timber framing is a very old practice and the beams used are so thick they do indeed last hundreds of years. However, timber framing refers to the structural beams themselves, not fascia like siding. You could still use OSB and new growth finger boards to do the non-structural framing, and many modern houses do.

Then there's houses like mine from the 1950s. They use solid maple beams, but oak and elm are also common to that time period. They're structurally more load bearing that way. Unlike timber framing they take advantage of both proper joints and things like hangers.

More modern construction doesn't really do much jointing from what I've seen, but I may be wrong or have a limitation of exposure here. They rely mainly on structural forms like hangers.

I'm not sure that any one is better than the other. They do have different considerations though. A timber frame is going to be tough to modify once it's stood up. A house like mine will probably also be tough to modify, but they could by introducing forms. The newer homes are probably the easiest to modify, but probably are somewhat weaker than the frames of my house. Strength like that doesn't really matter until it does, though, imo.

Hard disagree. At it's essence, a house is a shelter from the environment. The need for walls and a roof doesn't change.

Engineering a house for longevity isn't hard, all that really matters is water/moisture management.

Any "wrong" things with a house can be fixed. There are very few houses that are unsafe to inhabit and require a rebuild.

> Any "wrong" things with a house can be fixed.

Fixing anything can be done / is possible. That doesn't mean it is the brightest idea to always do so.

I agree, but this doesn't have anything to do with the woodenness of the construction. Virtually all interior walls in your typical North American single-family home, built with wood or not, are lacking insulation. Code doesn't require it, people don't want to pay extra for it, and builders don't want to convince people to spend the money for it.

Vacuum is a great insulator, because it blocks two fastest ways of heat transfer, conduction and convection, leaving only radiation. House insulation tries to do the same thing: filling up the wall with fluff blocks air from moving around, which impedes convection. Fluff itself is made from materials of low thermal conductivity, like cotton or mineral wool. At the end of the day, though, filling walls with fluff makes them less like vacuum, not more.

Probably even more applicable to software projects!

If you continuously remodel your house like software is, then by the time it is 50 years old there should be zero original walls left. But software is a lot cheaper to make changes to.

In the world of the Rich Third World, houses are almost always torn down after they're bought. It's actually pretty bad, because those houses are always built to last...but they only really last for about 8-15 years on average. Then it's almost always easier to rip and replace again instead of renovate, because they're built with concrete.

Yes, we have code about fireblocking, minimum insulation in wall cavities, etc. for that.

Structural code also updates with wood quality testing. In structural charts I've seen, old growth is around 3x stronger for the same size as newer SPF. It's about on par with an LVL product.

And homes are much more resilient to other forms of damage, like actually having to be bolted to the foundation instead of just resting on it, etc.

Seriously, they could have come out of a flatpak. I assumed cost cutting, because the risers are a different board than the tread.

Yes. Survivability to fire is explicitly listed as a requirement, and different classes of buildings have strict requirements on survivability (i.e., how long a structure must remain safe while subjected to a fire).

> I would expect a house built today to be much safer (...)

It is, but there are nuances. For example, modern houses have additional requirements on energy efficiency, which mean thermal insulation. Elements used in thermal insulation applications are regulated, but it turned out that some assumptions regarding flammability ended up not being met under some circumstances. Consequently, we've started to see a few incidents such as the Grendell tower fire.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grenfell_Tower_fire

Another event was the much recent fire in a Spanish residential complex.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Valencia_residential_comp...

In my city, we have entire communities of the city that people avoid buying homes in because of shoddy workmanship.

Greed corrupts and it has hit like a plague in many large neighbourhood projects over the decades.

You can have all the codes in the world, it doesn’t matter if no one follows them.

Note that what you think is important to lay people and what engineering thinks is important are very different things. Engineering cares about fire safety, insulation, and your house standing up to wind. Engineering doesn't care if you kick a hole in your walls - that is your own stupid fault (engineering cares that you cannot get pushed through the walls cartoon style, but a small hole is not a problem). Laypeople often reject great engineering because the marketing on bad engineering is better - old houses is one of those cases.

I'm talking about very serious flaws: not like drywall being thin, but more like joists that are thinner than the engineer specified or incomplete flashing that lets water leak into the insulation whenever it rains.

A few years ago, I worked in a brand new building, and we had issues like windows being installed inside out, pipes not being connected together, and rainwater trickling down walls under the paint.

These builds are poorly engineered -- not by the engineers and architects, but by the builders ignoring the engineers and architects. You can see numerous egregious examples here, for example: https://m.youtube.com/@Siteinspections

I’m getting down voted, I guess I touched a nerve of the civil engineering folks.

I came to the knowledge I have from having discussions with my civil engineering friends. They were immediately disenfranchised a few years into their careers when they saw the corruption of the “construction cartels” in my city.

I’m sure it’s not true of every city, but it is in the city I live in here in Western Canada. Also common elsewhere in the world.

Mass timber and other new engineered products should be good for this.

Wood in Portugal is laughably bad - they cut down all of their domestic stock of commercially viable construction lumber decades ago, and the domestic lumber industry feeds pulp and pellets exclusively, as there’s not much other use for eucalyptus and soft, twisted white pine.

Where this then leaves one is with imports - and it appears lumber producing companies sell their waste to Portugal to be sold as the only product available - honestly, everything has huge bark inclusions, pith, rotted out chunks, knots that bisect the entire piece, you name it. Can’t dry it either - leave it loose and it twists through 180 degrees. Strap it and it splits into splinters. Do it slow and it grows mushrooms.

I ended up importing everything from Estonia, where they know how to manage slow-growing forestry reserves. People literally came from the local villages to come admire the wood like it was an alien spacecraft - Baltic pine, but nice tight stuff that hasn’t flinched in 40 degree daily cycles.

High quality MDF tends to be denser, has a more consistent surface quality, and the composition of the wood fibers tends to be finer and more consistently distributed throughout the board. You'll get finer quality cuts (though 99% of the time, you'll want to edge band the MDF anyhow), for example. That said, you don't really go and get a stock list ordered by MDF density (beyond normal and lightweight MDF, anyhow). It's more just a characteristic of the better quality MDF, with relatively minor density differences between brands/product lines.

The bigger benefit is that they're much more likely to stock certified low and no-added-formaldehyde MDF, which make a big difference in formaldehyde off-gassing. Some people are more sensitive to it than others, and the last thing you want is for a beautifully veneered furniture piece to have to be returned because it's irritating the hell out of someone's eyes and nose.

I agree, and I'd go as far as to say that the author is a bit confused and showing some confirmation bias. Let me explain.

Engineered wood indeed creates elements from imperfect timber that are free from defects and exhibit the same engineering properties, if not better.

This has absolutely zero to do with old vs new growth trees. It is exclusively due to the need to maximize the amount of wood you can take out of a tree. Old growth trees might have more wood to pick and choose from, but nothing stops anyone from using the exact same techniques with timber from old growth trees.

The only reason why you don't see as much old growth trees in this process is the fact that there aren't that many anymore.

Another reason why you see new growth trees being used extensively in engineered wood products is that you can put together massive structural elements from smaller lumber elements, and they are far cheaper and plentiful.

There's a story on how the renovation of Oxford's dining halls required massive oak trees which were hard to come by, but it turned out those who built Oxford's dining halls had the foresight of planting oak trees when they built the structure. They did so because they knew the beams would eventually have to be renovated.

https://longnow.org/ideas/humans-and-trees-in-long-term-part...

With engineered lumber you do not need to plan centuries ahead to have your structural elements. You just build the elements you need from the timber you have at your disposal.

Tangent - some research from the '60s that shows the impact of the computer age on the timber industry:

CROMAX - A Crosscut First Computer Simulation Program to Determine Cutting Yield (1963) https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA134223.pdf

Development of a Computer Method for Predicting Lumber Cutting Yields (1967) https://www.nrs.fs.usda.gov/pubs/rp/rp_nc015.pdf

Veneer Recovery Prediction and Analysis Through Computer Simulation (1969) https://wfs.swst.org/index.php/wfs/article/view/398/398

Note that these are not frequently referenced PDFs and I occasionally had difficulty with the first click for them.

---

> There's a story on how the renovation of Oxford's dining halls ...

https://longnow.org/ideas/humans-and-trees-in-long-term-part...

> In all likelihood, the story is a blend of myth and reality. While the College, in keeping with standard woodland practices in Britain, has always kept groves of oaks intended for construction purposes, it isn’t clear that any particular set of trees was officially designated to replace the beams of the College dining hall

Another example (more grounded in modern times and less myth)...

https://www.military.com/history/why-us-navy-manages-its-own...

https://www.oldsaltblog.com/2020/11/constitution-grove-the-n...

https://ussconstitutionmuseum.org/2015/05/11/the-wooden-wall...

The author mostly cares about rot resistance in a window, though?

New engineered wood products rarely help with this. We have treated wood, but if someone is making an exterior window they'll generally resort to using a rot resistant species (white oak, sapeeli, cedar in budget applications) that isn't the SPF we use in engineered lumber.

I see this with my wooden windows from the 1990's - they're rotting and will have to be replaced wholesale. My wooden windows from pre-1960 on the other hand are restorable.

Replacing good wooden windows with vynil/aluminium windows is basically signing up to a subscription to the window company. You can't really restore that vynil crap, and the lifespan has a hard limit at 15 years when the double seal breaks.

I'm just replacing the panes and restoring the wood. On the parts where the wood rotted out, I'm replacing the crappy cheap wood with rot resistant hardwoods.

Modern windows aren't that much better. Window companies have good marketing.

A 200 year old single pane window is R-1. Double pane is R-2, and with argon maybe R-3 or R-4.5

Triple pane is R-3 to R-6 depending, and vacuum sealed glass is R-4 to R-14(!!! But no one buys that).

Changing an old window to a new one is often a stark difference because the old window leaked air. Not because the R-value is much lower. You can fix that with reglazing.

That's the seal between the panes of glass that make up the cartridge, has nothing to do with what the frame is made of. Replacing it when the seal fails is pretty trivial.

If you can fix old windows to be good - then good. I fully agree modern windows are not great, but R-2 is still better than 1.

We have cca proper winters (maybe not this year) and thermal+humidity sensors in most rooms so a badly insulating window/door would be noticed quickly.

I live in Ontario, I also have proper winters. It's not so much the plastic windows I bought than the ones previous owners did.

The argon seal eventually fails with enough cold/hot cycles, or wear on the silicon seal, etc.

If you're a diligent homeowner, you probably minimize the temperature cycles and take care of the seals, they might last 25-30 years (especially if it's good quality units).

If I'm buying a new window I want something that I can repair and maintain for a long time. So it's wood frame for me, and specifically a rot resistant wood species if possible (not old growth, unless it's reclaimed)

The windows in our house, Hudson Valley(NY), are at least 30 years(all mechanical parts are labelled as "pre-1994") - they are not showing much wear... considering that we get -20C to +30C swings every year.

That said, my property is really old and has effectively all window types in one place or another. Because it had 15years of lack of maintenance I can see which are repairable, which aren't, and how fast each degraded.

The really old windows aren't much of an issue (as OP said). Reglaze, reseal, performance is decent.

Cheap wooden windows are more of a problem, but repairable and upgradeable.

Cheap plastic windows have not fared well all. The plastic frame isn't in place due to heat/cold/UV exposure and they're a full replacement. They leak tremendous air and let bugs in.

The aluminium windows have fared a lot better.

Overall, some folks love repairing old broken stuff (or need to due to financial circumstances). Most of us, our life satisfaction lies very much elsewhere and to spend our valuable remaining free time to just to learn properly and maintain such stuff that doesn't matter much in long run seems... unwise. Investing into relationships and intense experiences work generally better here.

I see plenty of older folks who maintain their houses and garden around themselves (I mean proper gardens with fruits and veggies etc, not those uniform fugly mandatory US lawns). It takes so much of their energy that they have little time nor energy for some other serious hobbies, travel etc. Eventually in old age they can't keep up and its extremely depressing for them, since their effort is usually lost to their kids and they just get rid of that ol' house.

For the "leaks bugs" part - ladybugs here will find a way in as soon as you have a 1.5-2mm gap. They find them all. It can be between the frame and the siding, the silicone caulk cracking, a mechanical window that doesn't quite close tight, or anything else. It's a nice confirmation that your window has failed and leaks air.

With that said, I mean no offense to your beautiful country, but Swiss weather isn't as rigorous as Canadian weather. In the last week we've had a 36hour period with both +14c and -19c outdoor temperature. Our weather puts a lot of expansion stress on any outdoor facing material.

> Overall, some folks love repairing old broken stuff (or need to due to financial circumstances).

That's true. There's also a philosophical position that I don't like buying new when repairing isn't that hard. I've done it for TV's, computers, windows, etc. It's fun to learn how things work around you as well.

> Investing into relationships and intense experiences work generally better here.

I don't think they exclude each other at all

> I see plenty of older folks who maintain their houses and garden around themselves

For what it's worth, it's one of the better hobbies for retired people. It gets them outside and moving. Being close to nature is good for you as well.

Ideally they'd have hobbies that would keep them close to other people (the best thing for you), but all in all it's much better to be out gardening than on Facebook rotting their brain.

Disregard: I misread what you were saying. Shoulda had a v8.

Modern 'new growth' forestry is very sustainable, but old growth poaching still happens quite often in the US. I have friends on the regulatory side of logging and I've see illegal activity first hand.

I know that this article is not advocating for the logging of old growth trees, but focusing on the idea that 'old growth is better' can cause customers to value it enough that the extra profit incentivizes illegal harvesting.

Personally, I would like to see densified wood become a viable option. Even lightly densified new growth meets or exceeds the qualities of old growth wood.

https://www.thechemicalengineer.com/news/new-densified-wood-...

https://jwoodscience.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s1008...

It is not, I live in southern Chile, my house is right next to a Radiata Pine plantation. The ecological damage of pine and eucalyptus plantations is immense – the loss of biodiversity, the excessive water consumption, the poisoning of other types of vegetation, the degraded state of the soil after clearcut logging, etc.

Plus the social damage, lots of those plantations are on indigenous lands stolen by various machinations in the past.

Plus the heightened fire risk because of the pyrophoric nature of pine and eucalyptus trees. Native forests show much greater resistance to the propagation of wildfires which have become a yearly catastrophe in Chile in the past decade.

How is this “social damage” the fault of the forestry company and not the folks who took the land 200 years ago?

All land is stolen, as I’m sure the indigenous tribe in Chile who lived there took it from someone else who was already there. I’m not asking the modern ancestors of the Normans to give me back my ancestor’s Anglo Saxon lands in Northumberland. Nor am I blaming them for it 1,000 years later.

So ongoing logging and resource projects which preclude indigenous use of the land is active current day colonialism.

It's not some thing that happened 200 years ago it's active current day choices that persist the status quo.

According to the World Bank, "indigenous communities safeguard 80% of the world's remaining biodiversity and forests on their land are better maintained", and with less and less unoccupied land available, there are a lot of forces interested in displacing them.

> All land is stolen, as I’m sure the indigenous tribe in Chile who lived there took it from someone else who was already there.

Not necessarily, many tribes in the southern part of South America were first to settle here in the past 12,000 years.

See this link from Yale:

Piauí is what Brazilians call a grileiro, a land-grabber — someone who invades Indigenous or public land, or land that simply does not belong to them, before claiming it as their own. They frequently use fake documentation to carry out activities such as illegal logging, mining and real estate speculation.

https://e360.yale.edu/features/land-grabbers-the-growing-ass...

It reminds me of the struggle with the ivory trade. If you want to stop ivory poaching, the logical step is to ban the sale of ivory. Unfortunately, if the demand is still there, this new scarcity will drive up the price and incentivize more aggressive poaching.

The solution is to also target the demand. When billiards had a boom in popularity during the 1860's, a firm put out a $10,000 reward for anyone that could make a better alternative to ivory billiard balls. This led to the invention of the first synthetic polymer. The firm was able to corner the growing billiards ball market while undercutting the demand for ivory. The invention, for better or worse, also created the synthetic/polymer/plastic industry.

The problem is that old growth wood is better. This is why I would like to large scale densified wood product production take off. In theory, you can take a cheap sustainable product and turn it into a superior, stronger, longer lasting alternative.

It's a good product, carbon-negative, strong, fire resistant, etc.

Northern Europe already uses it a lot, it's starting to come to North America slowly.

Meanwhile the market for the recovered wood is limited. I've never seen someone use second hand wood for framing commercially (and I would suspect trying to do so would cause code or inspection issues). People building for themselves might - but they also often recover the wood themselves too.

Just my observations from watching many houses get demolished (still happening over a decade after earthquake here in Christchurch).

Recovered wood of nice old wood (particularly Rimu) does get used in furniture.

According to my friend, the largest seller of reclaimed wood in the US is a subsidiary of a fencing company that happens to have a significant number of government contracts to fence in federal grazing land. They replace their fencing every ~5 years and then sell the wood as reclaimed at a significant markup. It is technically reclaimed, but he said that they have to spend a lot of time removing those stapled on lumber yard price tags.

Less reputable operations force age lumber in the sun or use hydrogen peroxide, and then just lie about it being reclaimed.

His company mostly sources their wood from the demolition of old barns and warehouses. The senior sales people that trained him said that their job use to be much easier as they could just offer demo companies free removal. Now the DIY crowd is going around offering to buy boards off structures, and owners are starting to view that old eyesore of a barn as a cash cow. They had to bring on more sales people just to do the leg work and negotiate with owners.

Anyway, that convo is what was on my mind when I reacted negatively to the main post.

Trees growing in full sunlight grow quickly and have more widely spaced rings. Balsa wood for example, which is very light and soft, comes from balsa trees that have evolved to grow very quickly in sunny gaps caused by fallen trees in tropical forests.

You do definitely get thin rings when the trees are shaded but the monster old growth trees, the thin rings are usually due to the size of the trunk.

If trees are planted with sufficient spacing, an old tree's outer growth rings will be the same density as the inner growth rings. Trees grow to the water, sunlight, and nutrients that are available to them -- up until they become diseased or they grow so large that they struggle to support their own weight (at which point they start losing branches, which means they no longer get enough sunlight). To counteract the pull of gravity, older trees stop gaining height and instead focus on adding girth (i.e., thicker growth rings).

Tree plantations achieve a higher wood output by progressively thinning the plantings as the trees mature. This allows the remaining trees to keep growing at a fast clip and results in more even grain in the lumber.

In trees that are grown in more open conditions with plentiful sunlight, water, and nutrients, the growth rings are more even because there is nothing holding back their growth and forcing them to slow down.

No, it really is. Old pine from and some hardwoods grew in densely populated forests and there was a fight for sunlight. This severely limited how quickly the trees could grow per year resulting in tighter rings and far superior lumber.

Tree plantations are specced out to plant trees the perfect distance from each other so they can grow super fast. Spiked with fertilizers a pine can be harvested in year 15 for modern lumber. It's amazing how fast they can grow trees with enough sunlight and food.

Your 100 year old window probably has single paned glass, lead paint (which is an unmitigated disaster on a double hung window, possibly exceeding the degree of hazard from every other lead painted part of a house combined), and is likely installed in an uninsulated wall without a proper sill flashing.

That last point is worth some consideration. Essentially every window ever made either leaks or will leak. A small leak from a protected window [0] into an uninsulated wall cavity may not be terribly damaging. Add insulation and it’s a different story. Fortunately (per code! although many contractors completely ignore it for residential construction), newly installed windows are installed over a sill pan or other flashing that collects the water that leaks through the visible sill and directs it toward the outside.

So, sure, maybe it’s worth the money to remove a double hung window, carefully and safely remove all the paint, retrofit an insulated glass unit into it, and reinstall it with proper flashings. Or you can buy a new window and trash the old one.

[0] Old architecture was generally much better than new architecture at having little details that direct rain away from walls, windows and doors.

So changing a wood window for vynil/plastic/aluminium is signing up to a subscription to the window company.

Also, the nice thing is that everything you described above is easily DIY'able (yes, even the lead paint).

Also, in cold climates, you’re up against physics. The inner surface of the glass, especially around the edges, gets cold. If you keep your interior air at a comfortable humidity level on a cold night, water will condense onto the glass. Some of it will drip onto the frame. Over the course of a few years, even really nice wood will not really appreciate this.

So maybe don’t get a window with wood around the glass in a cold climate.

Wood windows on the old property have fared much better than plastic or aluminum. Plastic fared the worst.

Condensation will happen, but wood won't rot unless it can't dry out. It can dry out because you heat the house for one.

That said any material will take damage if you let water intrusion (plastic frames too!)

If water gets behind paint in painted wood, it'll rot.

Some windows have better details for this - the trim and sill are sloped so that any water will naturally drip out instead of gathering.

The windows that survived a long time tend to have those trim details that seem esthetic but are really functional.

This won't rot most wood, especially in cold weather. But it's terrible for the finish and the appearance, and it can cause brittleness and splitting.

It might be bad flashing on the exterior, bad trim details on the interior, or not heating the windows appropriately in the winter, etc.

Seeing these sort of issues as I renovate houses I've owned made me realize the difference between bottom dollar and paying for quality. And also stuff that masquerades as quality but is overpriced junk.

At 65F, 50% RH inside, the dew point is 46F. If you like sleeping warmer, 72F, 50% RH has a dew point of 52F. Most people like sleeping with shades or blinds closed, so somehow the inner glass surface, hiding behind window treatments, needs to be kept above the dew point or condensation needs to be tolerated. There’s a ~20 degree difference permitted between room air and the glass surface and the remaining 50-60 degrees between glass surface and outside. That’s a tall order to avoid condensation.

One can maintain a lower humidity (which is easier to do on a poorly sealed house). 30% RH at 72F pushes the dew point below 40F. Lower humidity also reduces the rate of condensation and speeds up drying in the daytime.

> bad flashing on the exterior

I don’t see how exterior flashing affects this. It’s an interior problem.

> bad trim details on the interior

Well, yes, I guess? If you make whatever interior surface touches the glass be impervious to water (fiberglass, vinyl or aluminum, for example, although aluminum has its own thermal issues), then maybe you don’t care about condensation. If you use very very well-insulating windows (triple paned with warm spacers, for example), you can actually reduce condensation.

> not heating the windows appropriately in the winter

The only houses I’ve seen that heat the windows either have forced air vents or radiators by the exterior walls. This is a somewhat outdated practice to help compensate for poorly insulated walls. Old houses may also have very low interior humidity, further reducing the problem.

I’d rather have a comfy house with comfortable humidity, built to tolerate a comfortable humidity. If that means aluminum-clad or fiberglass windows, so be it.

Oh, indoor condensation absolutely will happen. Even in a new build that's up to "passive house certification" levels of well-insulated.

You just have to design around this truth.

> I don’t see how exterior flashing affects this. It’s an interior problem.

It's a much bigger problem than what you're talking about. Water and moisture come between the window frame and the wall frame.

> I’d rather have a comfy house with comfortable humidity, built to tolerate a comfortable humidity.

But any decent wood DOES tolerate humidity. It won't if you do stupid things, like put latex paint on the interior side.

The problem you'd see with wood windows not tolerating the minuscule amount of water you're mentioning with condensation is simply because someone messed something up. They built a frame out of SPF wood. They painted over it with latex. Or both.

A window frame made out of any decent wood will last a century of the condensation moisture you're mentioning. I've renovated more than one century houses and I see the difference. The wood windows that rotted were either because of exterior issues, or latex paint on the interior, or wood that should simply not be used to make a window.

If it leaks air, it failed. There are easy ways to test that.

Most people only think of mechanical failure, or the double glaze popping as failure.

You can do simple tests to see if your windows have failed, and I'm sure after "decades of zero maintenance" most of yours have.

Because of that I don't consider any window that can't be made air-tight to be a failed window because otherwise I'd have to consider some of them to never be working by design because they have separate holes in them exactly to prevent air-tightness.

All of this is necessary because in general PVC windows can be way more air-tight than wood windows and stay air-tight way longer. Which is harmful to homes with ventilation that doesn't have dedicated air intake.

I'm drawing a blank; why is lead more dangerous there than elsewhere?

Other than that, lead and its common compounds as used in paint are solids and are ordinarily pretty good at staying put. Unless you chew on the wall or the paint is damaged, lead painted surfaces may not be immediate hazards if you leave them alone.

https://ravenwhimsy.tumblr.com/post/174022634675

And to think, they were just used for any old thing back then. This lumber doesn't really exist anymore other than reclamations.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/sitka-old-gr...

https://www.lumberupdate.com/about/

I do a lot of hobby wood working and the old growth pine seems to have more in common with ipe wood and the like rather than the stuff you buy in the stores. I'm holding on to all that old wood like it's gold.

Wood continues to cure and harden (and shrink) when it's put into place in construction - in 70-80 years, It'll be just as hard as the wood in a house from 1890.

It simply can't - it's effectively not the same material. Just in terms of growth rings, wood density, heartwood content, etc.

This stuff is really heavy and resistant, you keep it indeed.

My home's framing is mostly old growth. I bought an auger bit for rewiring. It's looks like a corkscrew. I won't ever use a spade bit (for making holes in framing) again.

My son then brought over his hole hog (?) power drill. It's scary powerful. Mosdef practice with some scrap wood first.

Unix, the Hole Hawg of operating systems: http://www.team.net/mjb/hawg.html

Old growth not only sounds better, it lasts longer and looks better.

Salvaged redwood is one particular place that this really stands out. There is no VG Heart available these days. If you want good straight, heartwood, you have to salvage old lumber or scavenge the forest floor for old felled logs.

When I see old houses in CA built from old growth redwood torn down and tossed into the landfill, it breaks me.

We humans are incredibly shortsighted. Today, we only have 2-5% of old growth trees left... and that's only because of people like you and me ( who care) fought to purchase them. Otherwise, someone would cut them down and sell them for a few bucks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6EnWSwfQ7w

Tone wood is bogus, don’t let anyone fool you. It is very beautiful on the other hand :)

Acoustic guitars are a totally different ball game of course.

The early cellars were all constructed using redwood, which was at that time plentiful and inexpensive ($0.20/lineal foot for 1x2). Redwood is easy to work with because it's harder than pine but softer than walnut and oak, so easy to saw and pin. "Clear heart" wood from the center of the tree doesn't warp much if stored well. It's also absorbent and so takes glue well.

We particularly liked using redwood for wine cellars because it's resistive to mold due to the high tannin content. Wine cellars are susceptible to mold because the cellar's refrigeration is designed to keep a high humidity level (70-80%) so as to prevent "ullage" (loss of liquid due to evaporation). Corks are semi-permeable, and so wine evaporates through the corks due to osmotic pressure.

Because I visited my dad's factory infrequently, I found the changes in wood noticeable -- the same way it's surprising how much my friend's kids have grown since I last saw them, unlike my kids who I see daily!

Over time redwood became increasingly expensive, and the quality lower, with more "A grade" wood containing sapwood instead of the clear heart wood we preferred, and fewer tree rings. Wine racks use quite a large number of small pieces -- lengths of 1x1, about 0.75" x 0.75" -- and at that small size the lower quality of the wood meant more pieces were unusable due to issues with the grain. It's important to select for good wood grain so that folks don't stick their hands in a wine rack and pull back a bleeding stump filled with redwood splinters, which are nasty because the tannin in the wood also prevents the body from disolving them easily.

Over time we switched to other sustainably-farmed wood like jarrah and mahogany, though those woods were super hard to work with -- they chewed up saw blades and were hard to get pins through.

He had a video a couple of years back on this exact subject. https://youtu.be/cWX4PgCFk7c

In fact, if you go over to the Reddit discussion on this post, they all agree.

New growth has much fewer knots and issues because they are grown in a way that does not force the trees to compete for sunlight.

As such they grow straighter, taller, and with far fewer knots and anomalies.

The old stuff is denser but that is the only advantage.

It's worth not throwing out but it's not magically better.

We don't care about making new growth denser because we created lvl, lsl, psl, clt, etc.

Newer features I appreciate are engineered joists (stronger, less creaking floors and noise transmission), doors and double pane windows that seal out air and noise, good insulation, central HVAC, PEX plumbing, neutral wiring, and the fact that if I need to fix or replace anything, it can be easily ordered if not found at a hardware store.

Yeah, maybe some of these materials are not as "sturdy" to the touch and maybe they have a shorter life-span, but I am positive they work better and are cheaper/easier to maintain.

They are cheaper, they are easier to replace, and at the moment (wood nerd hat on) we genuinely do not know if they have a shorter lifespan. But it's very likely that they do not, in part because of the construction around them. These concerns are not, in my experience, something that you really hear people who spend much time around structural work bring up. It's mostly a "back in the day" thing.

For furniture, on the other hand--things are different. But dimensional lumber as practiced today is a modern miracle.

As you allude to the material around it, we now have engineered, weather resistant sheathing, house wrap, and vinyl or metal siding, or some such very weather-proof stuff.

Most of the issues I have had with "old growth" wood in my 17th century homes were just due to water penetrating where it should not, rotting that wood, and then causing me a headache trying replace it with a similar material.

How do they deal with the superior energy efficiency of new windows? Even basic vinyl windows are better in terms of energy transfer, unless they're replacing the window frame with more modern equipment (factory made vinyl/aluminum) while keeping the original windows.

You could replace the glass with it yourself if you order the correct sizes.

https://youtu.be/hLbTpa9uEoY

That's even better as a product than triple-glazed windows.

Argon sealed double panes aren't magical in terms of R-values.

For the glass itself, you update it to something better than a single pane. Or put a storm window as needed.

Although energy efficiency in these homes have other problems. The walls are probably not insulated (and probably shouldn't be without a vapor barrier added outside beneath the siding - otherwise you will get lots of mold over time) and the weight box for the sash's are not insulated and can't be unless you want the window to no longer function, which may be OK as you can seal around it then.

The actual issues, in order of importance, are:

1. Air sealing the house. So yes, replacing and repairing windows. Not because double pane is so much better, but because your windows and doors are leaking unconditioned air into the house.

2. Roof insulation

3. Basement/crawl space insulation. Yes, this is more important than walls

4. Now you think about the walls. As you said, depending on the climate, from outside in may be safer (which can also be true for roof and basement depending on materials)

https://gizmodo.com/inside-san-francisos-fire-department-whe...