How Long Would It Take For Your House To Fall Completely Apart?

We have wood framed pier and beam constructed and unmaintained houses out here 200-250 yrs old. That's wood framed mind you.

When I was in Germany some years ago, one of the fellows I worked with expressed surprise that houses in the US were often made of wood. I told him that a good wood house could last 200 years. He asked "Yes, but what happens then?"

Different perception of "a long time" in Europe compared to the US.

Tad

I guess if one builds wooden houses one has to protect them from these expert house demolishers........and they do a good job too.

To try and dissuade these pesky little beasts, timber is often treated.....however some of these treatments can cause untold health problems to residents and over the years quite a few of these chemicals can no longer be used, well in the Western World anyhow.

By the way this is a picture of a termite mound in Western Australia and is just an example of thousands of them in desert regions of Australia.

Some years back (late '60's) I was in Copenhagen, Denmark, where I visited a church. They showed me some caned wooden chairs that were the "new" seating to replace some that had burned. The new chairs alone were over 200 years old... Admittedly, a church is likely to perform better routine maintenance than most families would on their furniture, but those chairs were not new when George III reigned in merry olde, for cryin' out loud!

How long it would take for a home to fall apart would depend upon the region it was built in, the materials used, the design, local organisms, local polluting industry and weather patterns.

In several mountainous regions of the U.S., wood framed homes that formerly lasted several hundred years now have life expectancies of less than 20 years. A number of local molds that slowly eat ordinary building materials have mutated and are now much more aggressive.

Acid rain resulting from coal fired power plants and other pollution sources reacts with brick mortar and turns the mortar into gypsum which is then washed away by rain. Many masonry buildings capable of lasting thousands of years are now fated to collapse within a single generation.

Increasingly severe storms, caused by global warming providing more heat energy to feed the storms, now subject many homes to increasingly damaging stresses.

Since 9/11, various organizations have launched investigations to better understand how vulnerable the entire building infrastructure is.

as you can see, just a few seconds....

A related question might ask: How much longer might a homeowners body (or sanity) have lasted if he had left his house alone, or rented?

yes..............how your house may look........ after the estate agent interviewed the suitable occupants and checked the house regularly??????????