In battle of old vs. new, quality matters
Not long ago, I was having breakfast with a reporter from my local newspaper, The Laconia Daily Sun in New Hampshire. He asked a fascinating question: Are new homes built better than older homes?
I could write a book on the complex answer. Years ago, you could absolutely find poorly built homes. There were some builders and contractors who did bad work, and the houses have since decayed.
But I also can take you to downtown Laconia and show you a 150-year-old building that was originally a home but now serves as our public library. This magnificent stone structure is in excellent condition. Great, magnificent homes such as this one are in abundance throughout the United States.
Based on the vast number of emails I get from homeowners, I’d say today’s workforce in the residential construction industry, as a whole, is not as concerned about quality as the craftsmen of 150 years ago were.
Back then, many considered their work a vocation and took lots of pride in their product. Today it seems that many workers treat what they do as a job. There’s a vast difference between a vocation and a job.
Let’s touch on materials. I have pieces of lumber taken from buildings built in the late 1800s. The lightcolored growth rings that represent the wood added to the tree in the spring of each year are much narrower than those from modern trees.
The percentage of darker bands (summer wood) to lighter bands (spring wood) in older lumber is almost equal. Today, there’s much more spring wood in the hybridized lumber grown by the timber companies. That matters because dark summer wood is more rot resistant and stronger.
As to plaster, you can take your fingernail and press it into a modern wall made from drywall. Forget about doing that to an older plaster wall. A properly mixed plaster with a white lime finish coat has a compressive strength near 3,000 pounds per square inch. It’s rocklike material, not something similar to cardboard.
I’ve been a master plumber since age 28. While modern PVC drain pipes have many positive qualities, I prefer cast iron. It is soundproof, fireproof and much stronger. When you flush a toilet and the water cascades down a cast-iron stack, you don’t hear Niagara Falls in your walls as you do with modern PVC pipe.
Please don’t misunderstand me. There are many modern materials that are far superior to the materials of old. We have better tools today that make us more productive and more accurate. But you need to have them in the hands of the people who are interested in producing the best product.
Fortunately, if you have the budget and the time, you can build a home today that will last for centuries. There are still builders and craftsmen who know how to take available high-quality materials and create a home far better than the baseline standard I see being constructed today.