As a child, I believed the people punching holes in walls on American television must be frighteningly strong. Turned out, they were merely tearing through paper walls...
and I thought, looking at our walls: where would jerry live inside that. because it's just solid, whereas in a wall in such a cartoon, there were practically extra rooms (for jerrys side). (do I need to say the name of the cartoon series? by todays standards, they show an awful lot of derogatory descriptions of people).
Every time i see those nuke test videos i think of my house (wich by US standards would be a bunker...) and think about how much damage it would do to everything not glas
I think in general American houses are little more than glorified garden sheds in Europe full stop. I am convinced that the children's story "The Three Little Pigs" is not a thing in the USA though it is a 19th century English tale🙂
Funny anecdote... a relative of mine emigrated to Florida. There he built himself a house using German brick construction. All the neighbors laughed at him for going to such lengths. Then Kathrina came along... while he had some damage to his roof (to be fair, over 1/3 of the shingles had to be replaced) and a window was broken, all the houses in the neighborhood were flattened. 🤷♂️
I mean, yeah! I'm still wondering why a country with so many extreme weather conditions (tornados, hurricanes etc) is still building houses with literal cardboard
I live near Goslar in the middle of Germany. Most houses in the city were built around the 14th and 15th century from oak wood framework and are in good condition. The "Kaiserpfalz" (a castle more than 1000 years old is build from thick stones and is like new.
It's funny to see how Ryan is amazed by the bricks the house is build while that looks totally normal to me, while I'm still the same way amazed when I see how houses in the US are build with these wooden empty walls.
Und es gibt ja auch manchmal Tornados in Deutschland xD Er meinte ja es gäbe keine. Unser Haus hat nen Tornado abbekommen und es hat den Garten hart getroffen und paar Ziegel das wars xD. Wen er das wüsste ... xD
ich, eine Holländerin lebe seit 40 jahr in Tirol, bin zufällig bei TH-cam auf Ryan getroffen...und habe mir dann einiges angeschaut...und du hast genau das geschrieben was ich dabei dacht! 😂 nicht böse, aber es ist so herrlich zum anschauen! wenn er unser über 100 jahr altes haus sehen würde...oder die fotos von der renovierung...ich glaub da würde er gar nicht mehr ausm staunen heraus kommen, denn die wände sind 50 bis 60 cm dick! auch die innenwände!!
Furthermore when in the US houses are on fire, all is left is a chimney (in colder areas). In Germany the houses are still there. They just need a renovation😅 Remember the fire in Hawaii a few months ago? People could have survived that staying at home in European houses. In Hawaii thousands of houses were grounded! Nothing left than their fences made of bricks! You build cheap, you receive cheap quality!
I live in the center of a German city in a house with 12 apartments. Lately one of my neighbors lit his apartment on fire, it completely burned down and he had to be rescued trough a windows by the fire department. After the fire was under control the house had to be checked by an ingeneer for its stability. The house was safe and only the stairways and one apartment had to be renewed. All other families could enter their apartments 16 hours after the fire started. The house is made of bricks and concrete.
imagine houses nowadays especially with multiple apartments are made to withstand a fireclass F90 ( basically the structure needs to withstand constant fire for minimum 90 minutes without giving up) other public buildings have sometime f120 thats like 120 minutes without breaking.
Most? Ever been to the many east European ones? Sure, they use stone, but it is not the same quality as German houses. Also Scandinavia often use wood for houses, just not in the city.
@@fckprc8149 i'm from Romania. Our house, bilt in 2020-2024 has 60cm walls. 35cm ceramic bricks+ 20cm rokwoll ext. isolation and 40- 60cm roof isolation with the same tipe of rockwoll. Wery old houses can have more then 1m thick walls...
@@fckprc8149 NO! It is not! But in the last 10-15 years it is wery usual.... Energy efficient houses! Nowadays you cant sell your house without a energy certificate.
@@fckprc8149 scandinavian houses HAVE to be made from wood because in the wet-cold climate, the mortar on the outside would fall off. Something similar can be seen in St. Petersburg, the buildings look like a 100 years old when they only are 20. So for scandinavia (or nordic countries in general), wood-based houses are a lot longer-lasting than ones made with bricks and mortar. Also you got to admit: the woodframing is a lot more sturdy than in america.
A village near me in Germany was hit by an F4 tornado a few years ago. Flying debris caused significant damage, and some houses lost their roofs. However, no house was completely destroyed.
This does nothing say anything about American houses in lightweight construction, which are common especially in high hurricane/natural disasters regions or the reasons why houses are built that way. Compare it with repairing a common German house. For example one of the 700 damaged or 6 totally destroyed houses from the F4 event in Pforzheim on 10. July 1968, only the roof reconstruction may cost more than such a complete American house, which IS a suitable choice in such circumstances. (Our non disaster renewing of our roof costed 48000€ in 2020). Let's be true, the SINGLE OTHER F4 event in Germany happened in Bad Liebenwerda, 24. Mai 1979 and I guess you weren't alive 15. Juli 1936 in Trinwillershagen or 7. August 1898, Cologne ... the next F4 events in history. Not saying that they aren't bad for the people. I for myself helped with the voluntary fire brigade on several occasions with far less "impressive" nature events. (source: Wikipedia, "Liste_von_Tornados_in_Europa") P.S.: "a few years ago" ... very strange usage of the word "few", don't you think?:) Well, I guess the last F4 in Germany ... 45 years ago, half a century ... is just a few years ago, when we also think about the F4 in Rockhausen 1582, that almost completely destroyed the city. I am not laughing about the event, but about the assessment of the whole situation and the poor quality when considering its relevance.
I live near the coast in the very north and we have to expect storms in every season of the year. With these types of houses an upcoming storm means to get garden things inside a (German built 😂...) shed, do not park the car near trees, get the animals inside, get some food and some DVDs in case internet does not work, de take a last long walk with the dog and lay back until the show is over. Mostly it takes Ich few hours, sometimes a couple of days. Here, most of the roofs are made solid enough for these conditions and there are just some trees to cut in pieces and clean up the roads and properties from leaves and little branches. Sometimes roofs are gone. But in more than 50 years I have never seen a house destroyed by a storm. The worst I have ever seen was the German Baltic coast between Kellenhusen and Flensburg after the storm and flood last autumn in which I have lost my workshop. The water crashed so many doors and windows and salty water came inside. The buildings were cleaned up and dried, the windows and doors replaced, but all furnitures and tools f.ex. were destroyed by the salt and the water. 🤷🏼♀️ Now I have to deal hard with my insurance and buy everything new. 😢 This is my worst experience. But this, as a German proverb says "is a pony farm" compared to what happens to houses and people who live in tornado areas in the US in ticky tacky houses. When I see these people on TV news standing in their damaged homes, crying about the loss and shocked, maybe still searching for family members or pets, I cry with them. What a horror trip... 😱😭😭😭 The, I wish the Americans to build houses like we do. You buy your first house, second, third... and that is the American way. We rent appartements and save money and get better Jobs until we are wealthy enough to get a credit for a house. Then we build one for hundred thousands of Euro. Ours was pretty cheap because we did a lot on our own because this is our profession. But it was more than 330.000 German Marks in 1997 just for the building without the ground and without interiour, kitchen, bathrooms etc. But here a house which is about 25 years old is still not an "old house"! An old house here is minimum 100 years old. So, people build a house for life time. And then they give it to their kids. And then to their Grand children, etc. The house where my great, great grandfather lived is still there and still beautiful, intact, dry and one part is a boarding school today, the other part a hotel. He bought this after the man who built it gave it to his son but this so died without having children. My great great grandfather was the mayor and got the house. He gave it to his son, he had three children but he was someone who loved to party, but his wife did not. So my great granny left him and the house was sold after his death. 🤷🏼♀️ A typical German story of an old house which Was build in 1747 and is still there. ❤ And this is normal that houses survive many generations of human habitants.
As a construction site leader in Germany seeing this house made is like a regular ,imagine they have way harder bricks "Kalksandstein" KS Quadro for example , they are like 498 x 240 x 498 mm and weigh around 100 kg / Brick ,also there are houses made out of concrete with Rebar, i would love to see his reaction on this type of construction. Usually houses in Europe are made to last.
what's expensive in construction is the work, not so much the material. A few pallets of bricks and a few cubic meters of concrete are usually around 10 to 20 thousand Euros, which is less than 10% of the total construction costs. Americans invest a lot of money into numerous work hours and in the end they have a house made of wood and cardboard.
Well, there's something else to it. Germans, Brits and Italians managed to "tame" Tornadoes and use them in their air forces. Gotta have some balls to do so! XD
Your commentary makes me wonder how American houses hold heavy furniture like sofas, pianos and bath tubs without letting them fall through to the first floor 😅
The house should have sort of a frame, with certain beams being loadbearing and the gaps in between closed with a flimsy filler, just like the drywalls we put into stone/cement houses in Germany not being as sturdy as the loadbearing brick/cement walls the outside and most inside walls are made of. It also depends where exactly you are placing your stuff upstairs. The upstairs floor can carry more weight closer to the walls where a bathtub gets usually installed than in the middle of a room. It's not that there weren't any accidents because of this - some time ago I learned about an incident when some people build a pool on a rooftop and the whole thing collapsed because people are stupid and water looks "light" so people are prone to forget that a liter of water weighs 1kg. A cube of 1x1x1 meter in lengths contains already 1000 liters and therefore weighs a ton so imagine what this pool must have weighed.. But it doesn't need a pool - accidents occured due to aquariums in the past because already a rather small beginner aquarium of 125 liter can easily weigh 300 kilograms and there isn't a limit in size.
i wanna see a german company just building a standard up to code house in one of the tornado areas in the US, and make the walls neon green so whenever there is chaos and destruction on the news you still see that one house thats still standing :D
Also this is a reason why in US everyone has air conditioner while in Europe is not that common, cuz bricks do a good job stopping the heat to get in or out, so European houses are much more efficient in terms of having an appropriate temperature inside. As example on Germany with possible -20 degrees in winter is quite important have those thick walls in order to not lose the home's heat.
it also means you can heat only the bath/bedrooms and leave the kitchen to get warm when in use only. also, once the doors close you've got significantly less noise.
Fun fact: Here in Germany, we don't walk on these concrete floors. We add a layer off acoustic insulation, than add another layer of finer rebar on top of that, along with floor heating usually these days, this is then poured in another 40mm (about 5/3 inch) of concrete, and on top of that we put wooden flooring or something. You would usually have to use heavy machinery or weaponry to go through a ceiling. However older houses often have wooden ceilings. These are made out of wooden beams 8 inches high and 4 inches wide (200mm x 100mm), one beam every half meter (3/2 feet); Flooring is then made out of wood at least 25mm or 1 inch thick, also from the underside it will be clad in wood and then be filled with clay.
Fun story: At the house of my mother in law I helped installing the doors for the shower. What they didnt tell me before was, that they had put their extra hardened floor tiles at the wall cuz they had leftovers. Since cutting was out of the line (the tiles where already in place) we had to drill through them... took us 2 days and 100€ worth of drill heads (extra hardened ones which are next best to diamond heads) and yes we used the inteded drilling speeds etc. We even had to work with 2 heads so that one could cool off while the other was in use xD
If you have floor heating you shouldn't add wood on top as it drastically reduces the efficiency. Best would be ceramic tiles or a thin layer of linoleum.
Hello, let me tell you this, I come from Poland and the same system is used in my country, usually to build a building such as a house. As in the video, it will take up to 30 days to reach the so-called closed, unfinished state, which means higher workloads, do the electrical, plumbing inside, etc., average, such a time construction of a building, i.e. up to three months from ready for occupancy and the costs are roughly around $300,000, it would cost to build such a building, maybe a little more if you want extras it is known that in each European country the wages are different, so each country also has different prices for building a building - for example, in Germany, building such a building is about EUR 1 million Pozdrawiam😉
2:19 "are they building a house or a fricking castle?" When I was a child I once asked my dad why no adult would build a blaket castle on their own, his answer: "Unser Haus ist aus Stein und Holz, also ist es auch iegendwie ein Schloss für Erwachsene." Still warms my heart to today
Ryan... Ive been watcing a few of your video's, Im bound to say they are extremely watchable and you have a certain something that keeps the viewer engage. Forgetting the content, which is very well researched and informative, you're obviously one heck of a nice guy. Well done and keep them coming. Ohh yes Im a 69 year old Brit living in Essex.
At the German city that I was born in, there was a tornado a couple of years back. I have never heard of tornados in Germany before. Thick trees were unrooted, glass broken in some places and the roof tiles were swept off a few roofs but the buildings structure was mostly unharmed.
"I have never heard of tornados in Germany" Germany is Europes Tornado Alley, category 3 isn't uncommon. It just, that a tornado (Windhose etc) normally only causes damage as you describe, with upper end being damaged walls from vehicles picked up by the wind. As such, it isn'T that newsworth compares to the same tornado in the US ripping through Toothpick-ville.
@@ogkendrick6392 Because you are superficial. Their houses are three times larger than a European one, and it would cost three times as much to build as brick. In the USA, building space is not as much of a problem as in Europe.
Swede here. I have a college who where on a three year contract in US. While he lived there he made a hole in the garage from comming too close with the grass trimmer. It was just a few mm of plastic. Blows my mind!
There's several scenes from American movies/shows where someone just punches a hole in the wall. If you punch a wall in Europe, you need a surgeon, not a handyman^^
My chief lived for 3 years in America,he told me,I never yoused a drill, i pushed the nail with my hands into the wall, and putting the picture frame on the wall, cardboard walls...
@@matzeh1985 Source? Without that, we can only assume that you are a liar. Also your source(nah, see below) would show that this highly depends on the location where the house is built, on local regulations and/or who is building that house. Effing source: Database GENESIS-Online, Statistisches Bundesamt and Informationsportal der Bauämter in den einzelnen Bundesländern. NOT A SOURCE: Some bad researched news reports(better call them oversimplified BS), f.e. from FAZ or Presseportal that claim such non saying nonsense like you!
@@matzeh1985 Also: In 2022 there were around 16.2 million single-family homes in Germany(19.3 million residential buildings in total). There were around 77,100 new single-family homes built, 17,600 of which were prefabricated (cheaper, quicker to build and usually without excavating basements, which promotes this trend) (Source: Statistisches Bundesamt). So your information (that you yourself introduced with "percentage"!) has a relevance of 0.4%. WTF? Good that we know ... now! And if you do not get it: What MAY BE (your comment) some day does not relativize or negate WHAT REALLY IS A FACT(? ouch, see below), NOW (what @hevog provided as information). Oh and BTW @hevog: It would also be nice to know where you got these "90%" cellar/basement share from ... Let me guess: You made that up?!:) Because there are whole regions, where it is culturally determined to build houses without a basement or not possible because of the underground and factors to be taken into account, such as statics. I was only surprised for a moment, but then I remembered where I was writing: TH-cam Lala-Land!
@@dieSpinntes stimmt was er sagt, die meisten einfam. Häuser die gebaut werden haben keinen Keller mehr. und das gillt nicht für fertighäuser. in hannover die ach so tollen Stadthäuser haben sogar nicht mal mehr ein grundstück was dir gehört sondern eine erb pacht. der letze müll über 3 etagen bei 5 meter breite der letze müll für 400 kbis 800k euros. aber die leute kaufen den schrott
I’m Italian and am used to very sturdy brick buildings with thick walls ( usually) and good finishing ( like insulated windows and thick doors etc). Many of the Romans ‘ constructions in bricks , just saying , survived more than 2.000 years! So every time I traveled to USA I was always surprised at the poor standard of their buildings, even in affluent neighborhoods. The surprise on Ryan’s expression and his explanations regarding how American houses are built give me a better understanding why I had those impressions!
@@valeriogerardi9358 prima di tutto non dappertutto c’è abusivismo… secondo si parlava dei materiali e della qualità delle costruzioni non di problemi burocratici…. Magari capire l’argomento prima di rispondere potrebbe evitare risposte non pertinenti
@@valeriogerardi9358 prima di tutto l’abusivismo non è diffuso ovunque… secondo si parlava di metodo e materiali da costruzione non di problemi burocratici… un consiglio : prima di rispondere sarebbe utile capire l’argomento per evitare risposte non pertinenti
Well, many Roman buildings even exceed modern European build quality as they knew how to create everlasting, indestructible concrete, knowledge that has been lost.
A little anecdote about my parents' house, which was shaken by a sudden and short earthquake in the 1990s: The roof, almost 200 tons of double concrete shingles, oak beams and insulation materials, flew vertically up some inches and fell perfectly back in place. Except a huge booming and shaking and of course terrified inhabitants, no damage happened to the structure🙂
Because Ryan was amazed at the reinforced concrete ceilings: in Austria (and I assume most of Europe) the are minimum loads per square meter that the floor needs to be able to hold. In Austria that's 500 kg/m2 Edit: and yes, houses in Europe are built to last
Its normal for us but its severe weather that makes it necessary to build very tough overhere in Europe. In the Alps you have avalages, rockslides and lots of snow, and here at the coast ( Northsea ) heavy huricane like storms and heavy rains are a thing. A typical US wooden frame house would be crusched in Austria and water/sand blasted to pieces at the coastline of Europe.
@@obelic71 I've been in many cat4+ hurricanes in a wooden house. I have my doubts about your extreme generalization. The only damage this house ever took was the garbage can falling over outside.
@@obelic71 there are arguments for cheap constructions though. For example if you live in the tornado alley. European style houses would also be destroyed but much more expensive to rebuild
@@KonglomeratYT Hurricanes and Typhoons are a different type of severe weather. (Several times experienced them on a ship and oil platform) In Europe we have due to the English channel and Baltic sea a funnel/ supercharger effect on heavy storms/hurricanes comming from the Atlantic. The Northsea is the most violent stretch of waterway because of this. The pulsing intermediate windgusts who can come from different directions under a minute, those are the killer. It slowly beats every sort of construction to pieces. When a hole/ crack is formed in a construction and the wind gets hold on it even a heavy concrete structures will fail. The light builds like Sheds, gardenhouses, holiday homes are the one who colapse the first. The scandanavian type of wooden construction is a mix. Sturdy thick wooden planks (like a log cabin) as walls with thick wooden shingle or fired brick tiled roof.
I have a 450 year old Tudor style house, there where floods, 4 wars and bad other ambient conditions, it is still in a good shape. When you visit Germany I’ll invite you Ryan to have a closer look
LOL, people here (and not only the Americans) are acting as if this was some unique German style. The whole of Europe builds houses from proper materials. The funny thing is that in the past Americans argued among other things that their "houses" are much more affordable due to cheaper materials used. But nowdays the same cardboard hovels sell in California for almost a million bucks.
Not only europe. Latín american we have the same style and materials. I always think that an american house is all wood because of natural disasters is less dangerous than a concrete wall if the walls fall in a human.
the "iphone" of houses, where the building company probably asks themselfs how to use as less materials as possible, when you get handed the keys, the seller tells you to not lean on your walls lol
😉 Pssst. This knowledge will make Americans cry. It's to early to give such a young nation an ancient building technic and the information that there is more then Germany in Europe. Be a bit more patient 😅
I live in a 240 year old stone house with walls 3 ft thick, its foundation is on bedrock. Just had the original stone roof replaced with a welsh slate one so it is good for a few more centuries :) We feel privileged to be part of this house's history and life (I live in Scotland)
I'm in germany now and I'm trying to figure out how to build a German style house back home. I love my floor heating, roladens, windows, and doors that can't be kicked in. Also no looking for studs when hanging tvs. I just hang it.
Americans living in tornado alley: "Alright lemme just build myself a cardboard box to live in." Germans with a regular family house: "CONCRETE, STEEL AND LASER MEASUREMENT!"
@@AlphaHorst Well our "tornados" are mostly a joke compared to most in the US. And we don't even notice most storms otherwise than "Maybe I shouldn't go outside at the moment.". I think that was meant by @miirami5761 ...
@yksnidog our tornados arw no joke... we simply did not build as much inside the tornado area. A tornado in an open field will cause next to no damage. The same tornado entering a street with houses on both sides will ripp off the roof, deform windows and flip cars. Are you perhaps confusing tornados with hurricanes? A tornado is a localised event, usually lasting a few minutes to a few hours at best. A hurricane usually forms over water(but they can also form over flat lands like a tundra) and wanders, often for days, before becoming a true "hurricane". They can last days and even weeks. They also cover a vast area.
@@AlphaHorst We have mostly less than 30 tornados per year over land (not hurricanes). At best 15 F2 or F2 plus. In the US when they call it a real Tornado they mean F3 or more. F0 to F2 where mostly not even reported if not by chance at places where they are measured. That's the one thing I had in mind. The other one is: 81 are reported per year if you take half of Texas (an area nearly the size of Germany) which has the lowest Tornado rate within the Tornado Alley. So yes: Ours are a joke to them. You can't say it is the same without being disrespectful to 71 killed by tornados per year in the US while the "Jahrhundertsturm Wiebke" (="Storm of the century named ") killed 64 people in the press in 1990, while in reality 35, which was even a hurricane to us. And yes Wiebke was an Beaufort 12. I know. But it was an Fujita F3. So sorry but I can't also go with your argument we don't build where they are. Hurricane for example found its way from the Atlantic/France to Prague in 1999 and also did it's damage in Germany. From Munich in the south to Dresden in the central east. So half of Germany was involved in 1999. So what you think of is a german "Windhose" while talking about an tornado. But that's most times just a vortex of wind which walks down the street and has some sand or leaves in it. And yes this can damage a german roof a bit. A Tornado is when you see the neighbors cow circling around and a dog is not fast enough to escape. Let's say it is a bit of another scope...
It's often overlooked that buying a house - or building it for this matter - is a very different matter in the US and in Germany. In the US, a house usually is purchased for a certain phase in life. In Germany, it's built as a forever home and to be passed down to coming generations.
I don't believe that to be actually true. You hear a lot about moving around, but only from certain professions like "Army families". Meanwhile Muricans also whine all the time about losing value from e g. Zoning changes as their houses were bought as long term investments or inheritance wealth... Feels like one of those movie clichés for vast shares of the population.
Our house is from 1894 and my friends live in a house vom 1452 (50 years before Americe was discovered) which has a basement from 1110. So yes, for generations.
We are renovating hubby’s grandparents house too and we’re pretty sure one of our daughters will want to keep it too. So really made to last for generations.
In Germany we are used to build our houses/buildings way more sturdy than comparable in the US. Most of our regions, esp. along the Rhine valley, wihich geologically is an opening rift in the continental plate, are sensible to earthquakes (usually 2-3, sometimes up to 7 or in extremes 9 on the Richter scale). And, although we usually do not have tornadoes here, heavy storms are appearing at least 4-6 times a year and then they are close to a tornado. Due to global warming / climate change, we experienced some tornadoes up to F3 or F4, but usually this does only destroy windows or the shindle layer of the roof. And, as for working times... usually between 07:00 and 17:00 and reduced noice during mid day. Times may vary a bit, due to governmental regulations and the season... The layers of the walls overlap, which makes it even more stable and flexible at the same time... In comparison to this, Americans still live in tents.. 🤣
@@speckijunkie1173 Did not say that... The Rhine Valley is a rift system between the Mediterranian Sea and Norway, including the Rhone Valley. And it is inside our plate, but in the future, this plate will open up here.
@@lunamorgenstern9107depends on the ground. The more rocky it is the more expensive it gets, my house has one but it was necessary to get a Demolition Master in because my house is built directly on and into granite... Well no wind in the world is blowing my house away...
We actually get tornadoes, but we also get "Fallböen" which are basically a huge amount of air falling from a rather high layer in our atmosphere at full speed. Those can cut down entire forests and American houses easily and also bring hailstorms with them, and we need our houses to be this sturdy to survive them. Also, we love our privacy and peace.
The German style is: building for eternity. There is more investment in insulation because the price for energy is enormous. In addition the roof has clay bricks. They are more stable and flexible during storm and hard rain. The inside walls are made by bricks for sound insulation and static stability. Therefore you have to plan the wiring, heat and water supply near perfection because you have to open the brick wall fore changing some stuff. At the end it is more economical, quieter and solid. Like I said: German style...
We build houses in a similar way in the UK. We use blocks and then bricks on the outside with a thermal insulation in between. We don't have crawl spaces under our houses. The " slab" is called the FOUNDATIONS. Everything gets built on top of it. You can't use PLASTIC to clad a house in the UK !! It's a fire hazard !
@@PotsdamSenior in Denmark it's not uncommon to add another layer of drywall for the inside, especially for rentals, because it makes it cheap and easy to allow tenants to hang stuff on the walls.. easy to repair or replace.
Common in germany? Whoa its the old method😂 Only the insulation material was air. "Verklinkern" is older than my grandpa was. Most of the northgerman houses are build so.
It's not German type of construction, it's Europian type of construction. And yes, we know siding, we don't use it, because it's rubbish. Because of thick walls and very good insulation we don't need AC most of the time. I turned my AC this year for 6 danys in total. In 8:17 you may see the house behind. Is also brick, we almost always build from bricks. I'm 40yo and I saw wood frame house maby 4 times.
As a european, I always wondered why americans continue building wooden shacks where there are tornadoes. Having cities wiped off the map each time a tornado pass by, seems not the good way to do things to me. (sorry for the bad english, I do my best)
Also look at their city plans. They are all cubic blocks and straight streets. Then you can laugh you ass off, when there is too much snow and all cars sliding down, because they were lazy to build accordingly to geography around, while europeans created hairpins and other stuff in cities, sp roads are safer. But once in a while some guy in US appears and creates tornado proof house, and those are extraordinary usually, because they use more natural shape and right materials.
@@michalviktorin6758 The difference is that European streets are usually hundred if not thousands of years old. some were build by the Romans and for all this time they didn't had the possibility to do anything else. meanwhile US streets and cities aren't as old as European ones. If you look at modern cities, no matter where they are build, they all look very geographically shaped. it's not always simple blocks but it always cuts through nature. because today no one builds a road around a hill. he just deleted the hill and sells the excess material to some place where it's needed to fill something up instead of removing it.
@@Noqtis Yes Europeans invaded American, and in few generations they lost all sense. But it really is not matter of how old, but how ignorant developers were. Just look at San Francisco, it must be a total nightmare in a winter.
@@michalviktorin6758 I am not expert on San Francisco's bay area weather, but it looks that there will be a few more drops of rain there during the winter.
I once actually had a tornado hit my village (in germany) and it went straight past a couple houses about 300ft away from my home and at 5am or so I could feel my bed shake a bit. That was the moment it passed by the other houses and the only damage that was caused was a couple roof tiles missing and one neighbour had a garden shed that was lifted out of his garden and thrown into his neighbours garden xD so literally just relocate the garden shed. But no houses were completly destroyed or even missing. The tornado even passed through a nearby forest and for comparison, it destroyed a lot of trees in the way that were all like an average 40cm (1'4") thick, it ripped clean through them but the houses just stood there like nothing has happened.
I read about that tornado! Ofc i dont wish to be hit by a tornado but i kinda wished i was at that part of germany Xd since i never saw a tornado before only on videos from stormchasers lol
"You guy's don't even get tornados right?" Yes we do, not as common as in US and not as big but since global warming it's more common. Also earthquakes in south Germany, you get special requirements when you build there. And we have flooding all over the country. And don't forget the wildfire's. But i think the main reason we build with bricks is for better temprature control. When i was a kid in the 90's we had sometimes below -20°C and 50cm snow in just a day, and in summer about 30°C are common so it's just cheaper in long term i think when you don't need to active heat or cool your house. And they last for ever if they don't get hit by a bomb.
The whole point of thermal insulation is not needing AC and only requiring some low-energy heating. I live in Slovakia, our newly built houses usually have brick walls about 16 inches thick PLUS additional thermal insulation around the walls at least another 8 inches thick (quite often whole 16 inches). Energy-efficient windows present another important element of house-insulation (both thermal and sound as a nice side-effect as well).
Though at some point that introduces new challenges. Passive houses are basically airtight, which requires some kind of ventilation to not suffocate and prevent molding, while exchanging as less heat with the outside as possible.
@@D4BASCHT I am facing this exact issue in Germany. The apartment is very well insulated, so I have to open the windows often to keep the humidity under 52%.
@@D4BASCHT Heat exchanging ventilation and air recirculation has been a thing for decades. It's almost standard already in newly built low energy buildings in France.
@@Soken50 Yes, it’s neither an issue. I just wanted to say that it makes other things more complicated. It only becomes an issue for old houses who get their insulation improved, since you either need per room ventilation and drill multiple holes into the exterior wall or slit up the walls and put pipes into them to retrofit central ventilation.
In Germany, more people rent appartments than buying of building a house. For most middle class people, building a house is a "once in a lifetime" experience.
We sometimes have a basement. There is never that space to crawl under the house, it goes directly on the ground. If you place the concrete you leave spots where the electricity, water and Drainage goes in (you place wooden boxes before pouring in the concrete so that you dont have to cut it out later. The Walls interior arent always made of stones. We do have dry construction too. The brick Walls outside go from 37 cm up tu 45 cm depending on how much one is willing to spend. We sometimes also have "plastic" (Styropor) on the outside, that usually measures 8 cm and is there to keep the temperatures out
People usually build their houses to live their whole life in it. Sometimes life happens (divorce, lack of money...) and they have to move. But we search a Job near the home and not a home near the Job. If you have a basement sometimes this is fully made of concrete... and sometimes by special bricks which is cheaper.
Houses in Germany and Austria usually musy be build to be energy efficient (we even give Energy ratings for buildings), must resist temperatures between -40 to +100°C and windspeeds up to 200hm/h. If those conditions are not met, you get problems with the regulators
I love your fascination with our German houses, but I have to note that the house shown in the video is just a "basic model". Most German houses have basements and are even more stable. In Germany there are construction engineers who statically calculate whether the house has been designed to be stable enough. After the calculations, the plan of the house goes to the building authority where the house is checked for hundreds of laws and only when everything is approved can the house be built. (Verifying the legality of the house can take several years. ) During construction, the house is inspected by the "building authority". Those were just a few facts... I hope this helps. Warm greetings from Germany🖐 (I really like your videos. They really helping me to improve my English knowledge.)
Yes, if you want a custom home, it can be expensive and take a long time to get approved. However, these complex approval procedures only apply to houses that are specifically built as individual copies. Most of the homes that are built are series homes that you choose from a catalog and have built. This eliminates the need for complex testing because the house series has already been tested and approved. It is only checked whether the specifications of the construction plans and statics are adhered to during construction.
@@era3477 I never ruled out that this procedure is similar in other countries. So I can't understand why they feel so "attacked" now. This was just a report for those who don't know this from their home country.
@@era3477 Yes, exactly, you can't just refer to this construction method to Germany, in principle it applies to the whole of Europe that, apart from Scandinavia, stone construction was predominantly used. The materials that were regionally available were used. In rocky areas, limestone, sandstone, volcanic stone or granite stones were used. In areas without rocks, people took clay and to bake hard bricks in kilns. It was also logical that wood was used for building in northern Scandinavia. There were enough of them. But when I see a Scandinavian durable wooden house, there are huge differences to a US wooden house made of lightweight construction. My partner lives in Germany in a wooden house settlement that was built around 1900 by Finns for German Navy employees. These houses are still as strong and healthy as they were 120 years ago. The same applies to Swedish and Norwegian wooden houses, some of which are 200 or 300 years old. In principle, you cannot say that wooden houses are worse than stone houses. It depends on how you build them.
The fact that americans call plywood, plastic and some screws with a roof on it a 'house' baffled me when I found out as a teen. Brickhouses are build to withstand decades and even centuries and only need some new roofing and Windows after some time. I understand that americans build their 'houses'like this because it's cheaper to rebuild this way BUT even if tornados aren't frequent and usual in germany they CAN happen and after one his a smaller City, only the room and windows had some damage. In america the whole house would be GONE
We are living in a house that was built 200 yrs ago. Solid rock foundation, all brick and mortar for the exterior walls, wood beams and straw-clay fillings 'Fachwerk' for the interior walls. The wooden roof construction is 90% still the original beams. House got hit by a heavy storm last year, lost a few tiles in the roofing. Got them replaced and slotted back in. Repair took about an hour. You do need a metric ton of WiFi Repeaters to get a signal across though. :)
The house in the video is an "El Cheapo" variant - without a cellar and a set up roof with no additional rooms there. A cellar would add at about +25 percent to the costs and is also made of a concrete bottom plate - and stone walls in most cases. If not concrete too. *These* people there will have little to no internal storage rooms as with a cellar (for heating, freezer, installation, sauna, air-raid bunker etc.). All will have to fit in the appartment(s). And no "dry space" for the washing under the roof. Moooh !
Yeah, agreed. This is actually a below-average variant for a family home in Germany. My grandparents' house (on my mother's side) actually had an additional insulating outer wall of bricks, but I'm not sure anymore which material it was. It also had a huge cellar with several rooms (for storage aswell as for the central heating system and for a hobby room with another smaller room attached for drying clothes during bad weather). So there are definitely more expensive versions of family homes out there.
Sorry they didn't build a cellar for you to imprison some girls from the neighborhood. Cellars were built to store food and keep it cool. Nowerdays we have fridges and supermarkets, so nobody needs to build that expensive shit unless you really need a swimming pool every time there's heavy rain. Drying your clothes under the roof is also a very stupid idea. There's a way better place for it called "outside".
It’s November in Cumbria and I live in a small coastal town. I live in a terraced house (row house) built in 1863. I haven’t yet had to use my central heating. The internal walls are all brick which have been plastered. I had my roof done 17 years ago when I extended into the attic, according to my deeds and all the records about my home apparently this was the first time my roof was touched since it was put on in 1863. Still have the original floor boards and the Victorian William Morris tiles. But I no longer use the fireplaces. They just look pretty.
The reason why the AI script constantly uses "it" is probably because they machine-translated a German script... "It starts at the corners" for example seems like a very direct translation of "Es beginnt an den Ecken" or something similar. Which still is awkward phrasing but it's not uncommon to indirectly refer to a process in German as the subject by using the third person singular neuter "es", literally "it"...
If you get your hands on any serious teaching book or instructions how to build anything technical, that phrase "Es beginnt ...", like a bad written fantasy script ... you should demand your money back!:) And immediately inform the responsible craft guild should impose a contractual penalty and immediately throw the grammar offender out of the association. Why an A.I. does translate things the way they do is because there IS NO INTELLIGENCE at all. They probably(that word is even a hint, hehe) mix and hallucinate every kind of mismatched and unrelated information from their stolen sources into the result, we where witnesses of. So there is a high chance that the wording is really PART of some fairy tale or fantasy story. Shouldn't this be a warning sign? A really big red one warning sign! In fact, those minutes we watched are a completely wasted time. We have to go through every single point and fact check that ... or just be stoopid as always and believe the nonsense that will hurt us later, when we make decisions based on our wrong understanding and half-knowledge, for example if someone decides to built a house and has this misinformation here as a background, transported by a non expert watching a video(!) and a effing A.I!. Of course that is unrealistic. Even the stupidest under us have to consult an expert and go through approval processes when building a house (fingers crossed! hehe).
@@dieSpinntObviously for technical manuals that isn't appropriate xD But I wouldn't be surprised if a professional wrote a TH-cam video script like that
It gets more usual, at least where I live, bc building a cellar has become ridiculously expensive, especially if the ground is a stone filled a-hole (we redid our garden and even there we had like 30cm of soil and everything below was just stones of varying size)
In Italy, an indipendent house like that can costs from 300k to 1M euros, depending on the luxury of the neighborhood and the distance from the connections to the center of the city (underground, bus stations, train stations) You cannot find an house like that in the city, only in suburbs
To answer your tornado question: We had one a few years ago ripping through the city I'm living in. For the normal houses it were mainly the roofs that were effected by it. Some lost a few shingles, a few older houses had a semi collapsed roof. Unless a tree fell on it, the walls seemed to be all fine. I also didn't see shattered windows, as we mainly have three layered one these days. In comparison, there was a furniture shop that kind of looked like a warehouse. The walls looked like they were build with sheets of tin. It was completely torn apart. The whole building was completely gone.
Tornados are extremely rare in Germany, but not actually nonexistent - one went through a couple of smaller towns near me a few years back. It actually mostly de-shingled some roofs and wrecked fences and stuff. Some buildings were damaged by falling trees and there were a lot of broken windows from airborne debris, but all in all, the towns were left standing.
You mention the three little pigs tale, at the beginning. American houses are built like the second pig, European houses are built like the third. The tale is clear on which one is sturdier. The brick itself also helps with the insulation, which is why we rarely need AC in most places. Although I'm not german, I would like to point out that this is the more modern house building. A century ago, they would be using actual stone, almost 50cm thick, for the outer walls in certain places. And yet, our brick houses are not invincible. I lived in an area prone to flooding a while back, and every now and I remember once that a house had a large hole in one of its external walls because the flood went through it (insurance and the townspeople generosity helped getting that family back on their feet).
This construction method also answers the question why most houses in this regions don't come with airconditioning. The interior of these bunker houses remain cool for most of the summer.
Depends on the duration of heating days and the insulation of windows. Many people only invest for simple window insulation. When you have a heat period for a week and temperatures are even high at night, it's pretty warm inside. I guess, we Germans and also majority of Europeans are building such houses to avoid fire scenarios like back in 14th till 20th century, when half of towns were destroyed by fires. Just have a look how fires in Hawaii a few months ago erased some towns, because every single house ignited pretty fast and spread the fire to the next house. Imagine these numbers in the past (lower population). Bremen 1041 - majority of historic city destroyed Vienna 1276 - 2/3 of town destroyed Munich 1327 - 1/3 of town destroyed Berlin (Center) 1378 & 1380 - majority destroyed Einbeck 1540 - whole town erased Arnstadt 1581 - 378 buildings destroyed Madgeburg 1631 - 1500 buildings destroyed Aachen 1656 - 4664 buildings destroyed London 1666 - 13000 houses/87 churches destroyed Oldenburg 1676 - just a few buildings left And this is just till 17th century with larger town. Who knows how many more villages were destroyed by fire without being documented.
Not all German houses are built from pre-insulated bricks like that, in fact they seem to be quite a new kind of brick. Our multi-family house (cellar, 2 regular stories and 1 story in the attic with sloped ceilings) was built in 1990 with “perforated” bricks (YTON). Most houses today are still built with similar bricks and then heavily insulated outside. Some inside walls are made out of drywall, mostly remodeled rooms and rooms below the attic.
Yes, construction methods are constantly changing as new building materials are constantly being invented. What has remained the same, however is, that the houses are still stone houses. My house, for example, dates back to the 1960s. The outer walls are made of sand-lime brick, which is clad on the outside with a layer of fired red bricks. There is rock wool insulation between the inner and outer parts of the different layers. The interior walls consist exclusively of plastered sand-lime brick. From the 1970s/80s onwards, sand-lime brick was often replaced by expanded concrete blocks (Yton), as this enabled faster and more cost-effective construction. However, I doubt that Yton houses will last as long as sand-lime brick houses.
Yton"Porenbeton" is a brigg with a lit of airbubbles in it. So it has a good insulatiin an compare to the clay brigg it can absorbe moisture. The inside wall are mostly from "Kalksandstein" it is much heavier to insulate agains sound...and it is more concrete, so tge wall can be thinner
these hollow briks are pretty much the norm for most type of normal houses for 1to 4 familys. for bigger constructions u would use steel and concreate. and some older buildings u can see full briks.
we also have ready houses. whole rooms,Walls will be delievered in one piece. So you can have a whole house in 3 days. inside the Walls Are made of Rigips, Pflaster of Paris...and when you knock hard on such a wall, there is hole in.
I live in a house that was built in 1901. Of course it was repeatedly renovated, new windows, new heating, etc. but the house is in excellent condition and will easily last another 100 years. When you build a house in Germany, it's so that your children's children can live in it too.
12:58 Here in germany there is a norm for everything. For example, there might be a bathroom on the upper floor and it might have a bathtub which usually holds 170 litres of water. Ad the person in the tub and the weight of the tub itself and you see why that concrete ceiling must be able to support a weight of 500kg/m2.
I live in Switzerland in the city of Basel, the oldest house still inhabited today was built in 1269. In the same street there are a dozen more houses that were built before the 1300s, and further up there are a few that were built around the 1400s Most of them are inhabited or used as small shops.
I mean Swiss Houses are beasts. I dunno anyone that does construction as rediculously expensive as we do. I'd really wanna see Americans react to our construction.
to be fair: while we do build solid houses, the methods have changed a lot. They had no steel concrete and laser measurements in the 13th century. And also, survivor bias: over 99% of the 13th century houses were STILL destroyed.
If you think that's a castle, then you should look how Greek houses are made. Have in mind that Greece (and I'm pretty sure Italy and other Mediterranean countries as well) has no tornados but a lot of seismic activity instead, so the buildings are constructed able to endure earthquakes of high magnitude. The concrete and iron underground foundation alone can be almost as deep as the height of the whole building sometimes. My house is made in the late '50s and has concrete pillars 50cm X 50cm all around that start 3,5 m underground, and a ceiling 40 cm thick, so during the 1999 Athens earthquake of 5,9 R the only damage I had was two books that had fallen down from the bookshelf.
My house, built in 2005, has a full basement! The floor slab (156m²) in the basement is made of steel-reinforced solid concrete. The thickness is between 25-30cm. In the area of the chimney, the foundation was reinforced to support the weight of the double chimney (height from the base plate 12m). I built the outside walls in the basement with 36cm thick concrete blocks! The masonry is plastered inside and out! The outer wall, if it is underground, was coated with a sealant and additionally covered with studded mats to protect against moisture. The room height in the basement is 280cm because I wanted to have a hobby workshop, a guest room and a bathroom with a toilet! The rest is a storage room, a utility room, a technical room with heating and a tank room. Cold protection insulation was laid between the concrete slab and the screed. The ground floor was built with 40cm thick Poroton stones (honeycomb clay stones)! These stones have good insulation and moisture diffusion properties! The room height is identical to the basement. The false ceilings are made of 20cm thick reinforced concrete. A combined impact sound and cold protection insulation was installed between the concrete ceiling and screed. The attic has the same ceiling height and is fully usable in the dormer area. The knee height for the roof beams is 130cm. The stage above the attic has a ceiling height of 225cm and could be used as additional living space by extending the dormer window. The roof beams are completely boarded and have 18cm thick insulation. The roof was covered with heavy concrete tiles. The shell construction and interior work were carried out entirely by the family (my father was a master bricklayer)! The electrical work was planned and carried out by my father-in-law, for example 1,800m of empty pipe was installed in the ceilings and walls to meet current and future requirements. The house is heated with a combined thermal solar-oil central heating. In addition, the heating system is supported by a tiled stove on each floor. Two of the tiled stove wood burner inserts are directly integrated into the central heating system using a water pocket. I have to say that the high construction costs have made these dimensions almost impossible. Even back then, this was only possible with the active support of the family. I was fortunate to have some professionals among friends and family. In the Swabian house-building region, this was not uncommon at the time. Unfortunately, a lot has changed here in the last few years. New houses are mostly prefabricated houses produced by the industry, which are also completely assembled by assembly companies. Fewer and fewer young people have the courage and technical skills to carry out such projects. The new houses are increasingly being built without basements and smaller, depending on the financial and personal effort! The basementless buildings can be recognized after a few years by the amount of additional storage sheds that have been built around the house.
A fun fact about those bricks and AC, my parents built their house in 2001, using bricks of course. The mineral whool filling does a great job when it comes to holding temperatures. In summer even when we hit like 30 deg Celsius, inside you almost need to wear a sweater bacause it can actually get chilly. in winter we can heat the entire house with a 10kw fireplace (using wood) for like 3hrs and it stays comfortably warm for the next 12 to 16 hrs, depending on the outside temperature. In very cold winters with minus 20 deg Celsius it didn't last as long. Still this way of building is really efficient and sometimes makes AC's kind of unnecessary :D
Well, a house in Germany costs around 2 times what a house costs in the US. But even that is a scam to ask so much for a house made of toothpicks, cardboard and (plastic!?!) paneling!!
Building with hollow blocks is practically the standard in Germany, but prefabricated wooden components have been established for years, especially for single-family houses and, for example, house extensions such as additional floors. There are various companies that specialize in creating absolutely precisely fitting individual elements that are then literally puzzled together. Very special filling material is often used that is blown into holes in the walls and creates extremely good insulation. This makes the entire construction relatively light but also very stable, so that the lower house structure is subjected to less strain, especially when adding more storeys. Maybe you can also find good video material to explain it.
Funny thing: in some countries we pour out of concrete even the corners of all the rooms, with steel reinforcement included, and concrete beams above all openings (doors, windows, etc.). As of price - a ~400 sqm home, 3 floors, 12 rooms, 6 bathrooms, 3 hall ways, extra deep foundation, staircase (also out of reinforced concrete) build this way is in my country ~ 150k - 250k Euros (depending on materials used, and less if you can do PM-ing yourself). Expensive materials come from isolation and special bricks. Time needed to finish ~ 2 months (most time in concrete drying :) )
The forgot the cellar! Basically every house i jor friends) owned had a cellar under the whole house, made out of concrete. It’s needed for all the stuff you don’t want to clutter up your home, the heating and the obligatory small workshop to repair things 😁
@@hegamona2864 depends. I‘m quite often in the north, last time in horumersiel as an example, and there was a basement (in fact even a studio basement) there. Cheaper houses (and in regions with very wet ground) obviously don’t have cellars, but i think most houses in Germany hav3 them…
uh, horumersiel, my region. sure, we have basements there, rarley. but they are often a trouble. right now im in the black forest and ive never seen a house without a basement, while up north its more common. Guess it depents on the one who commisioned the house. @@erebostd
@@erebostd older houses yes. Newer ones use them less than before since a basement in the wet ground is more expensive to build than just having the same space in 1st floor and 2nd floor. Safety regulations to prevent water damage are really expensive. I still want one. If I ever in my life get enough money to buy one. Not too likely with nowadays prices and salary. Working in the natural science department. I can only dream of having working conditions like the deutsche bahn train drivers. I work more for less salary and have to do overwork a lot more frequently than the lowest level of train divers there. At least I'm already far above average on salary in my company where we create newest technology genetically modified immune system cells to treat cancer.
As a German, I've always wondered why houses in America are made of cardboard and paper... there are tornadoes, hurricanes, etc... can someone enlighten me?😅
You can find a video of a T4 Tornado going through a Czech village here on youtube, the only damage done is to some roofs being lifted off and windows shattering from debris. The more modern houses can even survive a Tree being thrown at them by a Tornado, as they are made from rebar concrete and modern insulation, you could drive a train into them and they´d still be standing mostly. We do have Tornadoes here in germany as well, but they rarely do extensive damage and don´t get as big as compared to America, due to terrain and the way we build.
In the Netherlands the construction is fairly similar with the exception that in the west we first have to drill large concrete poles in the ground so the houses don’t sink in the marshy/clay/peat soil. The average length of these poles is 5-10 meters (16-32ft) but can be over 30m long, before they hit a solid sand layer.
U heeft paalfundering , in België wordt dit gebruikt als men op een kleibodem bouwt , in onze streek hebben we zowel een klei als zand ondergrond , ik heb het geluk dat ik in een duinenregio zit en mijn huis enkel een ringfundering benodigd van 70 cm tot een meter.
@@sergevereecke680 Klopt, we noemen ze hier heipalen. In België ook? M’n huidige huis staat ook op duinzand, maar m’n vorige huis amper 10 km verderop stond op klei grond en had heipalen van 11 meter.
@@sergevereecke680 Dank DEEPL dat ik je beter heb kunnen begrijpen: You have pile foundation , in Belgium this is used when building on a clay soil , in our region we have both clay and sand soil , I am fortunate to be in a dune region and my house only requires a ring foundation from 70 cm to a meter.
@@anouk6644 Dank DEEPL dat ik je beter kon begrijpen - zoals je zei: True, we call them piles here. In Belgium too? My current house is also on dune sand, but my previous house barely 10 km away was on clay soil and had piles of 11 meters. I'd like to add this: In the 1980s in Idar-Oberstein/Germany, I was shown a building built over a swamp for which a kind of hemispherical concrete basin had to be poured under the foundation before a building permit could be issued. I think that this added a high percentage to the actual construction costs.
The other exception is that we put a ton of conduits and junction boxes for the electrical installation, ventilation ducts and sewage pipes on the concrete floor in between the rebar before they pour it.
In Germany, labour costs are pretty high, because of taxes and mandatory insurances. You have to pay about 6k+ for a worker with a 2k monthly salary. Thats the reason why automation, modularization and standardization is such a big thing here. It may seem counterintuitive, but using more expensive prefabricated Elements might save a lot of money, because it reduces the amount of manual labour needed by a lot. A german crew framing wooden walls out of some bendy timber, sheething, insulating, drywalling an putting siding on, will much likely be a lot more expensive than just putting some rows of insulated bricks on top of each other and fill some concrete in.
An average ceiling for a 10m x 10m house weighs around 50 tons ;) there are 2 of them, the floor slab itself weighs another around 60 tons and the masonry + plaster + roof 100 tons. So a normal small German house weighs about 250 tons ^^
In Germany we don't frequently get tornadoes but we do get very strong winds that are called Orkan. Those can rip out trees and cause general mayhem, so buildings still need to be sturdy.
Wir alle kennen die Videos wo jemand mit der Faust ein Loch in ein Gipskarton " Wand" kloppt. Das kann man gerne mal hier probieren.Alles gute bei der Heilung, der Gebrochenen Knochen.
In Germany we put plaster and antimycotic paint on inside walls, or wallpaper, and whitewash over brickwork in cellars. Usually, the concrete of the floor is covered by either a wooden plank floor on top or by wall to wall carpets glued to the concrete... or in cheaper apartments, floor screed is used. In kitchens and bathrooms, screed or stone floor tiles are common, with glazed ceramic tiles on the walls in places you expect a lot of water platter from showering or moisture from cooking.
We live in a former farmhouse in Germany that was originally build in 1806. Okay -- modernized several times, energetically upgraded, but still -- 2 1/2 feet of brick walls indeed a build to last. And while we rarely have tornados (but increasingly so) we do have the occasional hurricane grade winter storm. Usually we merely loose a few roof shingles (heavy duty clay thingsthat weigh about 10 lbs each) during one of those.
Nein, wir haben auch heute keine Tornados oder Hurrikane. Das ist eine ganz andere Liga.(Nicht alles glauben, was die linksgrünen Journalisten so labern.)
Hello german dude here =D Just so you know how far german house-building has come... My dad added 4 rooms to our house when i was a child about 23 years ago, with some old army friends who became masons. The addition to the house has been certified to survive a crash from a small airplane. And there is pretty much no spots in a german-build house you cant park a heavy duty pickup without causing damage to the stability of the house.
11:50 some houses in Germany still are built with timber-frames instead of burnt hollow clay bricks (or sand-lime bricks). Indeed, Germany has seen a little renaissance of modular, fast-to-built timber-frame houses in recent years in some areas.
a well insulated Home (thick walls triple layer Windows,...) not only keeps noise out... but also in. May it playing Children, loud singing or a Couples private time.... a good insulation filters alot of Noise.
We generally prefer to have a full basement. Building a house on a concrete slab without a basement is chosen for financial reasons only. There is no crawl space underneath. All the plumbing and electrical connections are in the soil under the slab and penetrate through the slab into the house (when there's a basement, the generally enter it through the wall). The underground installation is designed to keep functional without maintenance for the lifetime of the house, which easily is 200 years. It has to be designed that way because you can't get down there and repair it. A brick house is able to withstand tornados without collapsing. There will be a lot of damage especially to the roof, but the masonry and concrete will sustain the tornado almost undamaged. It's easier to repair than to start from scratch. A huge advantage of these thick, hollow bricks is, they offer perfect insulation. The house needs no additional wall insulation. The reinforced concrete ceilings are very strong. For example, you can place a fish tank up to 450 liters (100 US gallons) wherever you want. Not every German house is designed that way. There are different styles of wooden construction too. From almost American style wooden framing to solid(!) wooden walls. Wooden houses usually have wooden ceilings. The so called Fertighaus (ready built house) uses wooden framing too. It comes in large, factory-made parts that barely fit on a truck and gets assembled by crane within a day or two. Almost everything needed is pre-installed in the parts, you can move in as soon as the crane finished work. There are hybrid designs too, with outer walls in stone masonry and internal walls made from lightweight wooden framing and wooden ceilings. You can get what you want as long as it's structurely sound and fits the energy efficiency requirements.
In France, american houses are illegal to build. They don't have all the fire security measures. Aside of that you are not allowed to build houses with "very low thermic insulation". When I went to the US, I was afraid to break the walls by just pushing on them. You don't have that fear in european houses as they are built correctly! And no our houses are not made to survive nuclear attack, just more than 20 years... Houses here are hell expensive
and the Swiss build a cellar and in such a way that it can also be used as a bunker to provide protection in the event of war, with extra-reinforced walls and doors
12:00 I built playgrounds, treehouses and stuff like that for nearly 10 years, mostly in Germany. On most of the construction sites we had at least once one of those big mobile cranes. Those crane operators are a special breed. They belong to the most chilled and most professional people I ever had the pleasure to work with.
Btw.. we have Tornados in Germany... think they are a little smaller, than in the US usually... but as our houses are build like this and you also have integrated blinds on the windows. During "a storm" we just go inside and close the blinds... most of the time nothing happens... rarely a few tiles from the roof are blown off - that's it.
As a child, I believed the people punching holes in walls on American television must be frighteningly strong. Turned out, they were merely tearing through paper walls...
Probably everyone fell for that.
@@steemlenn8797
No, I just thought "weird house"..
Same, I always wondered how they did it without tearing the skin and breaking every bone in their hand.
and I thought, looking at our walls: where would jerry live inside that. because it's just solid, whereas in a wall in such a cartoon, there were practically extra rooms (for jerrys side).
(do I need to say the name of the cartoon series? by todays standards, they show an awful lot of derogatory descriptions of people).
Every time i see those nuke test videos i think of my house (wich by US standards would be a bunker...) and think about how much damage it would do to everything not glas
German garden sheds are built like American houses. 😂
Same thought
The sheds on our property are built way sturdier than the average american house but not as sturdy as our house.
German here.
My garden shed is made from thick, solid sandstone bricks xD
I think in general American houses are little more than glorified garden sheds in Europe full stop. I am convinced that the children's story "The Three Little Pigs" is not a thing in the USA though it is a 19th century English tale🙂
That's a bit harsh. Not wrong though.
Funny anecdote... a relative of mine emigrated to Florida. There he built himself a house using German brick construction. All the neighbors laughed at him for going to such lengths. Then Kathrina came along... while he had some damage to his roof (to be fair, over 1/3 of the shingles had to be replaced) and a window was broken, all the houses in the neighborhood were flattened. 🤷♂️
that's so sad...
I mean, yeah! I'm still wondering why a country with so many extreme weather conditions (tornados, hurricanes etc) is still building houses with literal cardboard
@@ecenbtI think, because it is much cheaper and faster. And most of them must have insurance
I live near Goslar in the middle of Germany. Most houses in the city were built around the 14th and 15th century from oak wood framework and are in good condition. The "Kaiserpfalz" (a castle more than 1000 years old is build from thick stones and is like new.
@@ecenbtbecause Americans are arrogant and never learn from their mistakes. They call that experience and tradition.
americans be like: why are you using bricks? germans be like: I'm building a house, not a shed
I think I would be crazy afraid to walk on the first floor or above of one of those huts in the USA they call houses.
We even use bricks for building sheds as well, wood is for roof 🇿🇦
@@Apagador69 you can literally break through the floor in american houses
It's funny to see how Ryan is amazed by the bricks the house is build while that looks totally normal to me, while I'm still the same way amazed when I see how houses in the US are build with these wooden empty walls.
I thought of it as thin even...
Most garden sheds and garages in Europe are built much more strongly than houses in the US. I always wondered why...
"Bricks"... Looks like Ytong to me...
@@cyberfux nah its actual brick, I've seen these things, still look thin.
@@cyberfux No, those are definitely clay bricks. I know them first hand here in Austria. 🇦🇹
Ryan zu zusehen ist immer so, als würde man ein Kind dabei beobachten, wie es die Welt entdeckt 😊
Und es gibt ja auch manchmal Tornados in Deutschland xD Er meinte ja es gäbe keine. Unser Haus hat nen Tornado abbekommen und es hat den Garten hart getroffen und paar Ziegel das wars xD. Wen er das wüsste ... xD
ich, eine Holländerin lebe seit 40 jahr in Tirol, bin zufällig bei TH-cam auf Ryan getroffen...und habe mir dann einiges angeschaut...und du hast genau das geschrieben was ich dabei dacht! 😂 nicht böse, aber es ist so herrlich zum anschauen!
wenn er unser über 100 jahr altes haus sehen würde...oder die fotos von der renovierung...ich glaub da würde er gar nicht mehr ausm staunen heraus kommen, denn die wände sind 50 bis 60 cm dick! auch die innenwände!!
@@annemoritz578geht ja teilweise auch bis zu 1 meter
aber schön, dass er es zu schätzen weiss, was für uns normal ist.
@@annemoritz578 thats also in my case, in Poland. We've 100 years old brick house and the walls are like 40 - 50 cm :)
14:15 - "Hey, we got some wood"
Sorry to disappoint you - that's only temporary, to keep the concrete in shape.
Yep, I wanted to write him the same thing 😁👍
The difference is, when a storm hits a house in Germany, maybe a little damage on the roof, when a storm hits a house in the USA, no house left 😂
Furthermore when in the US houses are on fire, all is left is a chimney (in colder areas). In Germany the houses are still there. They just need a renovation😅
Remember the fire in Hawaii a few months ago? People could have survived that staying at home in European houses. In Hawaii thousands of houses were grounded! Nothing left than their fences made of bricks!
You build cheap, you receive cheap quality!
@@Anno_Nymouse I fully agree 🤣👍🍺🍻🍺
With the storms you can get in America even our German houses would turn into projectiles quite quickly
so true
Sad but true.
That's why germans are always stunned when they see in american movies that people shoot through the walls of houses...
I find it funny that you mentioned the 3 Little Pigs.
'Cause if you remember the story:
The stone house was the one that survived.
the wolf will blow his lung out at this house😄
Yes, that was his joke.
i liked the house of the 4th pig the most though, made out of wolf skulls and bones - it's not as sturdy as stone, but it sends a message.
@@williamrockwood5234
🤣🤣🤣☝️😈
Ede Wolf left the chat.
XD
I live in the center of a German city in a house with 12 apartments. Lately one of my neighbors lit his apartment on fire, it completely burned down and he had to be rescued trough a windows by the fire department. After the fire was under control the house had to be checked by an ingeneer for its stability. The house was safe and only the stairways and one apartment had to be renewed. All other families could enter their apartments 16 hours after the fire started. The house is made of bricks and concrete.
...Aachen?
Herr the same. House from the 60s. Burned multiple times.
Is it a house from before 1930?
imagine houses nowadays especially with multiple apartments are made to withstand a fireclass F90 ( basically the structure needs to withstand constant fire for minimum 90 minutes without giving up) other public buildings have sometime f120 thats like 120 minutes without breaking.
@@endoplasmatischesretikulum4999 from 1990
16:33 actually the slab for the 2nd floor should weigh around 30-35ish metric tons going by the volume they mentioned
That just normal building quality in most countries in Europe.
Most? Ever been to the many east European ones? Sure, they use stone, but it is not the same quality as German houses. Also Scandinavia often use wood for houses, just not in the city.
@@fckprc8149 i'm from Romania. Our house, bilt in 2020-2024 has 60cm walls.
35cm ceramic bricks+ 20cm rokwoll ext. isolation and 40- 60cm roof isolation with the same tipe of rockwoll.
Wery old houses can have more then 1m thick walls...
@@Iulius.M And would you say that this is the majority of houses?
@@fckprc8149 NO! It is not!
But in the last 10-15 years it is wery usual.... Energy efficient houses!
Nowadays you cant sell your house without a energy certificate.
@@fckprc8149 scandinavian houses HAVE to be made from wood because in the wet-cold climate, the mortar on the outside would fall off.
Something similar can be seen in St. Petersburg, the buildings look like a 100 years old when they only are 20.
So for scandinavia (or nordic countries in general), wood-based houses are a lot longer-lasting than ones made with bricks and mortar.
Also you got to admit: the woodframing is a lot more sturdy than in america.
A village near me in Germany was hit by an F4 tornado a few years ago. Flying debris caused significant damage, and some houses lost their roofs. However, no house was completely destroyed.
Or just plain gone for that matter.
This does nothing say anything about American houses in lightweight construction, which are common especially in high hurricane/natural disasters regions or the reasons why houses are built that way. Compare it with repairing a common German house. For example one of the 700 damaged or 6 totally destroyed houses from the F4 event in Pforzheim on 10. July 1968, only the roof reconstruction may cost more than such a complete American house, which IS a suitable choice in such circumstances. (Our non disaster renewing of our roof costed 48000€ in 2020). Let's be true, the SINGLE OTHER F4 event in Germany happened in Bad Liebenwerda, 24. Mai 1979 and I guess you weren't alive 15. Juli 1936 in Trinwillershagen or 7. August 1898, Cologne ... the next F4 events in history. Not saying that they aren't bad for the people. I for myself helped with the voluntary fire brigade on several occasions with far less "impressive" nature events.
(source: Wikipedia, "Liste_von_Tornados_in_Europa")
P.S.: "a few years ago" ... very strange usage of the word "few", don't you think?:) Well, I guess the last F4 in Germany ... 45 years ago, half a century ... is just a few years ago, when we also think about the F4 in Rockhausen 1582, that almost completely destroyed the city. I am not laughing about the event, but about the assessment of the whole situation and the poor quality when considering its relevance.
Same situation here in Czech Republic 3 years ago. There was a serious tornado in Southern Moravia and mostly roofs were damaged. :)
We had Something likes this in my part of Germany too, where we had many trees fall over and some roofs dented in etc.
I live near the coast in the very north and we have to expect storms in every season of the year.
With these types of houses an upcoming storm means to get garden things inside a (German built 😂...) shed, do not park the car near trees, get the animals inside, get some food and some DVDs in case internet does not work, de take a last long walk with the dog and lay back until the show is over.
Mostly it takes Ich few hours, sometimes a couple of days.
Here, most of the roofs are made solid enough for these conditions and there are just some trees to cut in pieces and clean up the roads and properties from leaves and little branches.
Sometimes roofs are gone. But in more than 50 years I have never seen a house destroyed by a storm.
The worst I have ever seen was the German Baltic coast between Kellenhusen and Flensburg after the storm and flood last autumn in which I have lost my workshop. The water crashed so many doors and windows and salty water came inside.
The buildings were cleaned up and dried, the windows and doors replaced, but all furnitures and tools f.ex. were destroyed by the salt and the water. 🤷🏼♀️
Now I have to deal hard with my insurance and buy everything new. 😢
This is my worst experience.
But this, as a German proverb says "is a pony farm" compared to what happens to houses and people who live in tornado areas in the US in ticky tacky houses.
When I see these people on TV news standing in their damaged homes, crying about the loss and shocked, maybe still searching for family members or pets, I cry with them.
What a horror trip... 😱😭😭😭
The, I wish the Americans to build houses like we do.
You buy your first house, second, third... and that is the American way.
We rent appartements and save money and get better Jobs until we are wealthy enough to get a credit for a house. Then we build one for hundred thousands of Euro. Ours was pretty cheap because we did a lot on our own because this is our profession. But it was more than 330.000 German Marks in 1997 just for the building without the ground and without interiour, kitchen, bathrooms etc.
But here a house which is about 25 years old is still not an "old house"!
An old house here is minimum 100 years old.
So, people build a house for life time. And then they give it to their kids. And then to their Grand children, etc.
The house where my great, great grandfather lived is still there and still beautiful, intact, dry and one part is a boarding school today, the other part a hotel. He bought this after the man who built it gave it to his son but this so died without having children.
My great great grandfather was the mayor and got the house. He gave it to his son, he had three children but he was someone who loved to party, but his wife did not.
So my great granny left him and the house was sold after his death. 🤷🏼♀️
A typical German story of an old house which Was build in 1747 and is still there. ❤
And this is normal that houses survive many generations of human habitants.
As a construction site leader in Germany seeing this house made is like a regular ,imagine they have way harder bricks "Kalksandstein" KS Quadro for example , they are like 498 x 240 x 498 mm and weigh around 100 kg / Brick ,also there are houses made out of concrete with Rebar, i would love to see his reaction on this type of construction. Usually houses in Europe are made to last.
14:17 "Hey we got some wood" - Germans: "relax its only temporarily for the concrete pouring"
Ich musste so sehr lachen omg 😂😂😂😂😂😂
I couldn't imagine living in an American paper house
good side is if you got angry and punch a wall you dont gonna have any injuries 👍 In Europe you breake your Hand
They live in shoe boxes.
On the upside, they are easily rebuild when damaged...
@@edgyguy7084 yes, because they fall apart quickly and easy 🙃
@@endorphinchen its easier to rebuild it then it is to restore a brick house...
In Germany they don't build houses out of matches like in the USA. The prices for these are not even half of those in the USA.
what's expensive in construction is the work, not so much the material. A few pallets of bricks and a few cubic meters of concrete are usually around 10 to 20 thousand Euros, which is less than 10% of the total construction costs. Americans invest a lot of money into numerous work hours and in the end they have a house made of wood and cardboard.
@@ekesandras1481 if the work is the most cash, why dont they pay like 20% or 30% more and build a nice stone house in america?...
5:13 that's why we don't get tornados often. They are afraid of our solid houses. 😂
and trailer parks attract tornadoes. everybody knows that.
Well, there's something else to it. Germans, Brits and Italians managed to "tame" Tornadoes and use them in their air forces. Gotta have some balls to do so! XD
actually germany has the most tornados in whole europe iirc.
Tornado in the US: "HAHAHA I GO WROOOOM!
Tornado in Germany: "Ouch! Hit my nose on another brick wall!"
trailer parks attract tornadoes. Everybody knows that.
Your commentary makes me wonder how American houses hold heavy furniture like sofas, pianos and bath tubs without letting them fall through to the first floor 😅
I guess that stuff is all on the first floor. No bathing upstairs!
@@steemlenn8797
No! Most bath tubs are upstairs!
The walls are flimsy, but the floors are ok-ish.
Remember "The money pit" starring Tom Hanks? ^^
The house should have sort of a frame, with certain beams being loadbearing and the gaps in between closed with a flimsy filler, just like the drywalls we put into stone/cement houses in Germany not being as sturdy as the loadbearing brick/cement walls the outside and most inside walls are made of.
It also depends where exactly you are placing your stuff upstairs.
The upstairs floor can carry more weight closer to the walls where a bathtub gets usually installed than in the middle of a room.
It's not that there weren't any accidents because of this - some time ago I learned about an incident when some people build a pool on a rooftop and the whole thing collapsed because people are stupid and water looks "light" so people are prone to forget that a liter of water weighs 1kg.
A cube of 1x1x1 meter in lengths contains already 1000 liters and therefore weighs a ton so imagine what this pool must have weighed..
But it doesn't need a pool - accidents occured due to aquariums in the past because already a rather small beginner aquarium of 125 liter can easily weigh 300 kilograms and there isn't a limit in size.
i wanna see a german company just building a standard up to code house in one of the tornado areas in the US, and make the walls neon green so whenever there is chaos and destruction on the news you still see that one house thats still standing :D
Also this is a reason why in US everyone has air conditioner while in Europe is not that common, cuz bricks do a good job stopping the heat to get in or out, so European houses are much more efficient in terms of having an appropriate temperature inside. As example on Germany with possible -20 degrees in winter is quite important have those thick walls in order to not lose the home's heat.
it also means you can heat only the bath/bedrooms and leave the kitchen to get warm when in use only.
also, once the doors close you've got significantly less noise.
Kurz um wir bauen am besten 🤷🏼♂️💪🏼
@@glenngrabow7816 aber wahrscheinlich auch am teuersten :-/
Much too expensive Here. It didnt even have a cellar... I think if you have a Million for a house, you retire and live in a 100k house happy though
I cant remember when we had -20 degrees here (near Dortmund). But yes brick walls are great to keep temperature comfortable.
Fun fact: Here in Germany, we don't walk on these concrete floors. We add a layer off acoustic insulation, than add another layer of finer rebar on top of that, along with floor heating usually these days, this is then poured in another 40mm (about 5/3 inch) of concrete, and on top of that we put wooden flooring or something. You would usually have to use heavy machinery or weaponry to go through a ceiling. However older houses often have wooden ceilings. These are made out of wooden beams 8 inches high and 4 inches wide (200mm x 100mm), one beam every half meter (3/2 feet); Flooring is then made out of wood at least 25mm or 1 inch thick, also from the underside it will be clad in wood and then be filled with clay.
Fun story: At the house of my mother in law I helped installing the doors for the shower. What they didnt tell me before was, that they had put their extra hardened floor tiles at the wall cuz they had leftovers. Since cutting was out of the line (the tiles where already in place) we had to drill through them... took us 2 days and 100€ worth of drill heads (extra hardened ones which are next best to diamond heads) and yes we used the inteded drilling speeds etc. We even had to work with 2 heads so that one could cool off while the other was in use xD
@@manuelvo1798 at some point I would have switched to a Duschvorhang^^
@@adrianfriedrich5622 Me 2 I guess, but it wasnt my house 😅
If you have floor heating you shouldn't add wood on top as it drastically reduces the efficiency. Best would be ceramic tiles or a thin layer of linoleum.
@@David_randomnumber No use going into too many details here...
Hello, let me tell you this, I come from Poland and the same system is used in my country, usually to build a building such as a house. As in the video, it will take up to 30 days to reach the so-called closed, unfinished state, which means higher workloads, do the electrical, plumbing inside, etc., average, such a time construction of a building, i.e. up to three months from ready for occupancy
and the costs are roughly around $300,000, it would cost to build such a building, maybe a little more if you want extras
it is known that in each European country the wages are different, so each country also has different prices for building a building - for example, in Germany, building such a building is about EUR 1 million
Pozdrawiam😉
now u know why we in germany say: "your houses in the us are made of paper"
At least our houses don't fly around the country when there's a bit of wind😂
@@torstengschwendtner9531 They also don't fly around if there is a lot of wind.
@@steemlenn8797they also don't fly around when hit by a tornado...
my garden shed is build sturdier than an american house
Must feel like camping all year long, living in an american house.
2:19 "are they building a house or a fricking castle?"
When I was a child I once asked my dad why no adult would build a blaket castle on their own, his answer: "Unser Haus ist aus Stein und Holz, also ist es auch iegendwie ein Schloss für Erwachsene." Still warms my heart to today
My home is my castle!
@@__christopher__ Wie heißt das doch bei den Amis immer? My home is my kassler!
That's a nice story to remember ☀️
Ryan... Ive been watcing a few of your video's, Im bound to say they are extremely watchable and you have a certain something that keeps the viewer engage. Forgetting the content, which is very well researched and informative, you're obviously one heck of a nice guy. Well done and keep them coming. Ohh yes Im a 69 year old Brit living in Essex.
At the German city that I was born in, there was a tornado a couple of years back. I have never heard of tornados in Germany before. Thick trees were unrooted, glass broken in some places and the roof tiles were swept off a few roofs but the buildings structure was mostly unharmed.
"I have never heard of tornados in Germany"
Germany is Europes Tornado Alley, category 3 isn't uncommon. It just, that a tornado (Windhose etc) normally only causes damage as you describe, with upper end being damaged walls from vehicles picked up by the wind. As such, it isn'T that newsworth compares to the same tornado in the US ripping through Toothpick-ville.
I'm always amazed at the shitty houses in America 😂
@@ogkendrick6392 Because you are superficial. Their houses are three times larger than a European one, and it would cost three times as much to build as brick. In the USA, building space is not as much of a problem as in Europe.
@@erosgritti5171 Blablabla big dollhouse dunkeyballs ahh build quality
Kiel?
Swede here.
I have a college who where on a three year contract in US. While he lived there he made a hole in the garage from comming too close with the grass trimmer. It was just a few mm of plastic.
Blows my mind!
There's several scenes from American movies/shows where someone just punches a hole in the wall. If you punch a wall in Europe, you need a surgeon, not a handyman^^
@@hannahl.4494you would need a handman to fix your hand
I jus l
My chief lived for 3 years in America,he told me,I never yoused a drill, i pushed the nail with my hands into the wall, and putting the picture frame on the wall, cardboard walls...
Even after listening to the story of the Three Little Pigs, the Americans still built their houses out of sticks.
Most of the houses in Germany (like 90 percent) have cellars made of concrete or bricks .
That percentage only is true with old houses. Today, only about one in four newly built houses have basements.
@@matzeh1985 Source? Without that, we can only assume that you are a liar. Also your source(nah, see below) would show that this highly depends on the location where the house is built, on local regulations and/or who is building that house.
Effing source: Database GENESIS-Online, Statistisches Bundesamt and Informationsportal der Bauämter in den einzelnen Bundesländern. NOT A SOURCE: Some bad researched news reports(better call them oversimplified BS), f.e. from FAZ or Presseportal that claim such non saying nonsense like you!
@@matzeh1985 Also: In 2022 there were around 16.2 million single-family homes in Germany(19.3 million residential buildings in total). There were around 77,100 new single-family homes built, 17,600 of which were prefabricated (cheaper, quicker to build and usually without excavating basements, which promotes this trend) (Source: Statistisches Bundesamt). So your information (that you yourself introduced with "percentage"!) has a relevance of 0.4%. WTF? Good that we know ... now!
And if you do not get it: What MAY BE (your comment) some day does not relativize or negate WHAT REALLY IS A FACT(? ouch, see below), NOW (what @hevog provided as information). Oh and BTW @hevog: It would also be nice to know where you got these "90%" cellar/basement share from ... Let me guess: You made that up?!:) Because there are whole regions, where it is culturally determined to build houses without a basement or not possible because of the underground and factors to be taken into account, such as statics.
I was only surprised for a moment, but then I remembered where I was writing: TH-cam Lala-Land!
@@dieSpinntkomm mal runter 😳😂 wie kann man sich in so ne kleinigkeit so reinsteigern?!
@@dieSpinntes stimmt was er sagt, die meisten einfam. Häuser die gebaut werden haben keinen Keller mehr. und das gillt nicht für fertighäuser. in hannover die ach so tollen Stadthäuser haben sogar nicht mal mehr ein grundstück was dir gehört sondern eine erb pacht. der letze müll über 3 etagen bei 5 meter breite der letze müll für 400 kbis 800k euros. aber die leute kaufen den schrott
I’m Italian and am used to very sturdy brick buildings with thick walls ( usually) and good finishing ( like insulated windows and thick doors etc).
Many of the Romans ‘ constructions in bricks , just saying , survived more than 2.000 years! So every time I traveled to USA I was always surprised at the poor standard of their buildings, even in affluent neighborhoods.
The surprise on Ryan’s expression and his explanations regarding how American houses are built give me a better understanding why I had those impressions!
the remains of Romans can also be seen in Germany. Giant aquaducts like from the Eifel to Cologne, after nearly 2 millennia it's still there.
Ma che stai a di' che qua è tutto abusivo? 🤣
@@valeriogerardi9358 prima di tutto non dappertutto c’è abusivismo… secondo si parlava dei materiali e della qualità delle costruzioni non di problemi burocratici…. Magari capire l’argomento prima di rispondere potrebbe evitare risposte non pertinenti
@@valeriogerardi9358 prima di tutto l’abusivismo non è diffuso ovunque… secondo si parlava di metodo e materiali da costruzione non di problemi burocratici… un consiglio : prima di rispondere sarebbe utile capire l’argomento per evitare risposte non pertinenti
Well, many Roman buildings even exceed modern European build quality as they knew how to create everlasting, indestructible concrete, knowledge that has been lost.
A little anecdote about my parents' house, which was shaken by a sudden and short earthquake in the 1990s: The roof, almost 200 tons of double concrete shingles, oak beams and insulation materials, flew vertically up some inches and fell perfectly back in place. Except a huge booming and shaking and of course terrified inhabitants, no damage happened to the structure🙂
We do have houses made from plastic in Europe.... for kids to play 😂
... and the funny thing is. They're all designed and molded like an American house.
@@royvankan2723 Lego is a model for a propper German house.
Because Ryan was amazed at the reinforced concrete ceilings: in Austria (and I assume most of Europe) the are minimum loads per square meter that the floor needs to be able to hold. In Austria that's 500 kg/m2
Edit: and yes, houses in Europe are built to last
Its normal for us but its severe weather that makes it necessary to build very tough overhere in Europe.
In the Alps you have avalages, rockslides and lots of snow, and here at the coast ( Northsea ) heavy huricane like storms and heavy rains are a thing.
A typical US wooden frame house would be crusched in Austria and water/sand blasted to pieces at the coastline of Europe.
@@obelic71 I've been in many cat4+ hurricanes in a wooden house. I have my doubts about your extreme generalization. The only damage this house ever took was the garbage can falling over outside.
@@KonglomeratYT In another comment you said, that you lived your whole life in a brick house in NYC 🤔
@@obelic71 there are arguments for cheap constructions though. For example if you live in the tornado alley. European style houses would also be destroyed but much more expensive to rebuild
@@KonglomeratYT Hurricanes and Typhoons are a different type of severe weather. (Several times experienced them on a ship and oil platform)
In Europe we have due to the English channel and Baltic sea a funnel/ supercharger effect on heavy storms/hurricanes comming from the Atlantic.
The Northsea is the most violent stretch of waterway because of this.
The pulsing intermediate windgusts who can come from different directions under a minute, those are the killer.
It slowly beats every sort of construction to pieces.
When a hole/ crack is formed in a construction and the wind gets hold on it even a heavy concrete structures will fail.
The light builds like Sheds, gardenhouses, holiday homes are the one who colapse the first.
The scandanavian type of wooden construction is a mix.
Sturdy thick wooden planks (like a log cabin) as walls with thick wooden shingle or fired brick tiled roof.
I have a 450 year old Tudor style house, there where floods, 4 wars and bad other ambient conditions, it is still in a good shape. When you visit Germany I’ll invite you Ryan to have a closer look
LOL, people here (and not only the Americans) are acting as if this was some unique German style. The whole of Europe builds houses from proper materials.
The funny thing is that in the past Americans argued among other things that their "houses" are much more affordable due to cheaper materials used. But nowdays the same cardboard hovels sell in California for almost a million bucks.
Houses in northern Europe are built differently (for example Sweden) and South Italy for example is also different.
Not only europe. Latín american we have the same style and materials. I always think that an american house is all wood because of natural disasters is less dangerous than a concrete wall if the walls fall in a human.
the "iphone" of houses, where the building company probably asks themselfs how to use as less materials as possible, when you get handed the keys, the seller tells you to not lean on your walls lol
😉 Pssst. This knowledge will make Americans cry. It's to early to give such a young nation an ancient building technic and the information that there is more then Germany in Europe. Be a bit more patient 😅
I live in a 240 year old stone house with walls 3 ft thick, its foundation is on bedrock. Just had the original stone roof replaced with a welsh slate one so it is good for a few more centuries :) We feel privileged to be part of this house's history and life (I live in Scotland)
Sounds like a castle. 🙂
240 years old by Italian standards, it is a modern house
@@erosgritti5171😅
I'm in germany now and I'm trying to figure out how to build a German style house back home. I love my floor heating, roladens, windows, and doors that can't be kicked in. Also no looking for studs when hanging tvs. I just hang it.
Americans living in tornado alley: "Alright lemme just build myself a cardboard box to live in." Germans with a regular family house: "CONCRETE, STEEL AND LASER MEASUREMENT!"
It's funny that you said "US living in tornado alley" considering that Germany is Europe's tornado and storm alley
@@AlphaHorst Well our "tornados" are mostly a joke compared to most in the US. And we don't even notice most storms otherwise than "Maybe I shouldn't go outside at the moment.". I think that was meant by @miirami5761 ...
@yksnidog our tornados arw no joke... we simply did not build as much inside the tornado area.
A tornado in an open field will cause next to no damage. The same tornado entering a street with houses on both sides will ripp off the roof, deform windows and flip cars.
Are you perhaps confusing tornados with hurricanes?
A tornado is a localised event, usually lasting a few minutes to a few hours at best.
A hurricane usually forms over water(but they can also form over flat lands like a tundra) and wanders, often for days, before becoming a true "hurricane". They can last days and even weeks.
They also cover a vast area.
@@AlphaHorst We have mostly less than 30 tornados per year over land (not hurricanes). At best 15 F2 or F2 plus.
In the US when they call it a real Tornado they mean F3 or more. F0 to F2 where mostly not even reported if not by chance at places where they are measured. That's the one thing I had in mind.
The other one is: 81 are reported per year if you take half of Texas (an area nearly the size of Germany) which has the lowest Tornado rate within the Tornado Alley.
So yes: Ours are a joke to them. You can't say it is the same without being disrespectful to 71 killed by tornados per year in the US while the "Jahrhundertsturm Wiebke" (="Storm of the century named ") killed 64 people in the press in 1990, while in reality 35, which was even a hurricane to us. And yes Wiebke was an Beaufort 12. I know. But it was an Fujita F3.
So sorry but I can't also go with your argument we don't build where they are. Hurricane for example found its way from the Atlantic/France to Prague in 1999 and also did it's damage in Germany. From Munich in the south to Dresden in the central east. So half of Germany was involved in 1999.
So what you think of is a german "Windhose" while talking about an tornado. But that's most times just a vortex of wind which walks down the street and has some sand or leaves in it. And yes this can damage a german roof a bit. A Tornado is when you see the neighbors cow circling around and a dog is not fast enough to escape. Let's say it is a bit of another scope...
😂😂😂😂😂
It's often overlooked that buying a house - or building it for this matter - is a very different matter in the US and in Germany.
In the US, a house usually is purchased for a certain phase in life.
In Germany, it's built as a forever home and to be passed down to coming generations.
@@Relex_92 especially the rich people that benefit off the 50% or so peopl that can't afford a house ...
I don't believe that to be actually true.
You hear a lot about moving around, but only from certain professions like "Army families".
Meanwhile Muricans also whine all the time about losing value from e g. Zoning changes as their houses were bought as long term investments or inheritance wealth...
Feels like one of those movie clichés for vast shares of the population.
Our house is from 1894 and my friends live in a house vom 1452 (50 years before Americe was discovered) which has a basement from 1110.
So yes, for generations.
We are renovating hubby’s grandparents house too and we’re pretty sure one of our daughters will want to keep it too. So really made to last for generations.
@@dirk_walter They really should have waited a year more to build that basement!
In Germany we are used to build our houses/buildings way more sturdy than comparable in the US. Most of our regions, esp. along the Rhine valley, wihich geologically is an opening rift in the continental plate, are sensible to earthquakes (usually 2-3, sometimes up to 7 or in extremes 9 on the Richter scale). And, although we usually do not have tornadoes here, heavy storms are appearing at least 4-6 times a year and then they are close to a tornado. Due to global warming / climate change, we experienced some tornadoes up to F3 or F4, but usually this does only destroy windows or the shindle layer of the roof.
And, as for working times... usually between 07:00 and 17:00 and reduced noice during mid day. Times may vary a bit, due to governmental regulations and the season...
The layers of the walls overlap, which makes it even more stable and flexible at the same time...
In comparison to this, Americans still live in tents.. 🤣
9 ON the Richter scale you are Definitely not a German and pretty Low IQ too 9 IS way to high
Germany does Not lie between two continental plates making a Level 9 earthquake impossible
@@speckijunkie1173 Did not say that... The Rhine Valley is a rift system between the Mediterranian Sea and Norway, including the Rhone Valley.
And it is inside our plate, but in the future, this plate will open up here.
Most of the older houses in germany have a cellar too.
I wouldn't accept a house without a cellar
A cellar is very expensiv to build according to my father.
Most modern ones as well. But that depends on where you built, the ground must make that possible.
@@lunamorgenstern9107depends on the ground. The more rocky it is the more expensive it gets, my house has one but it was necessary to get a Demolition Master in because my house is built directly on and into granite... Well no wind in the world is blowing my house away...
Most houses across Europe have cellars
We actually get tornadoes, but we also get "Fallböen" which are basically a huge amount of air falling from a rather high layer in our atmosphere at full speed. Those can cut down entire forests and American houses easily and also bring hailstorms with them, and we need our houses to be this sturdy to survive them. Also, we love our privacy and peace.
In fact Germany has dozens of tornadoes every year. Klingt komisch, ist aber so.
(They are less strong so it's seldom if something gets destroyed)
@@steemlenn8797 True
@@steemlenn8797 Wasn't it just a year ago that there was this big tornado around Paderborn?
My town is pretty safe but sure that one crossed news.
@@MegaManNeo yup. I live in the Paderborn area and there was massive damage due to the tornado in Paderborn and Lippstadt, it was scary.
A "windhose" is not a tornado ;-)
This is not just in Germany, the whole Europe build houses using similar method.
The German style is: building for eternity. There is more investment in insulation because the price for energy is enormous. In addition the roof has clay bricks. They are more stable and flexible during storm and hard rain. The inside walls are made by bricks for sound insulation and static stability. Therefore you have to plan the wiring, heat and water supply near perfection because you have to open the brick wall fore changing some stuff. At the end it is more economical, quieter and solid. Like I said: German style...
We build houses in a similar way in the UK. We use blocks and then bricks on the outside with a thermal insulation in between.
We don't have crawl spaces under our houses.
The " slab" is called the FOUNDATIONS. Everything gets built on top of it.
You can't use PLASTIC to clad a house in the UK !! It's a fire hazard !
That's another common method in Germany as well. I prefer it, because you don't damage the insulation when you drill a hole in the wall.
@@PotsdamSenior in Denmark it's not uncommon to add another layer of drywall for the inside, especially for rentals, because it makes it cheap and easy to allow tenants to hang stuff on the walls.. easy to repair or replace.
Common in germany?
Whoa its the old method😂
Only the insulation material was air.
"Verklinkern" is older than my grandpa was. Most of the northgerman houses are build so.
@@Dennis-Hinz Sure! A method being old doesn't mean it's not common!
Depends on the plastic, in Germany we have that as well, its fireproof plastic.
Some people like me however just put metal there...
It's not German type of construction, it's Europian type of construction. And yes, we know siding, we don't use it, because it's rubbish. Because of thick walls and very good insulation we don't need AC most of the time. I turned my AC this year for 6 danys in total. In 8:17 you may see the house behind. Is also brick, we almost always build from bricks. I'm 40yo and I saw wood frame house maby 4 times.
As a european, I always wondered why americans continue building wooden shacks where there are tornadoes. Having cities wiped off the map each time a tornado pass by, seems not the good way to do things to me. (sorry for the bad english, I do my best)
the problem is that they are always very proud with what they do - whatever they do
Also look at their city plans. They are all cubic blocks and straight streets. Then you can laugh you ass off, when there is too much snow and all cars sliding down, because they were lazy to build accordingly to geography around, while europeans created hairpins and other stuff in cities, sp roads are safer. But once in a while some guy in US appears and creates tornado proof house, and those are extraordinary usually, because they use more natural shape and right materials.
@@michalviktorin6758
The difference is that European streets are usually hundred if not thousands of years old. some were build by the Romans and for all this time they didn't had the possibility to do anything else. meanwhile US streets and cities aren't as old as European ones. If you look at modern cities, no matter where they are build, they all look very geographically shaped. it's not always simple blocks but it always cuts through nature. because today no one builds a road around a hill. he just deleted the hill and sells the excess material to some place where it's needed to fill something up instead of removing it.
@@Noqtis Yes Europeans invaded American, and in few generations they lost all sense. But it really is not matter of how old, but how ignorant developers were. Just look at San Francisco, it must be a total nightmare in a winter.
@@michalviktorin6758 I am not expert on San Francisco's bay area weather, but it looks that there will be a few more drops of rain there during the winter.
I once actually had a tornado hit my village (in germany) and it went straight past a couple houses about 300ft away from my home and at 5am or so I could feel my bed shake a bit. That was the moment it passed by the other houses and the only damage that was caused was a couple roof tiles missing and one neighbour had a garden shed that was lifted out of his garden and thrown into his neighbours garden xD so literally just relocate the garden shed. But no houses were completly destroyed or even missing. The tornado even passed through a nearby forest and for comparison, it destroyed a lot of trees in the way that were all like an average 40cm (1'4") thick, it ripped clean through them but the houses just stood there like nothing has happened.
I read about that tornado! Ofc i dont wish to be hit by a tornado but i kinda wished i was at that part of germany Xd since i never saw a tornado before only on videos from stormchasers lol
@@Mapleshade... I didn't saw it either, that was the most action that I witnessed in my life. It's so damn quiet out here, nothing ever happens.
"You guy's don't even get tornados right?" Yes we do, not as common as in US and not as big but since global warming it's more common. Also earthquakes in south Germany, you get special requirements when you build there. And we have flooding all over the country. And don't forget the wildfire's. But i think the main reason we build with bricks is for better temprature control. When i was a kid in the 90's we had sometimes below -20°C and 50cm snow in just a day, and in summer about 30°C are common so it's just cheaper in long term i think when you don't need to active heat or cool your house. And they last for ever if they don't get hit by a bomb.
The whole point of thermal insulation is not needing AC and only requiring some low-energy heating. I live in Slovakia, our newly built houses usually have brick walls about 16 inches thick PLUS additional thermal insulation around the walls at least another 8 inches thick (quite often whole 16 inches). Energy-efficient windows present another important element of house-insulation (both thermal and sound as a nice side-effect as well).
Though at some point that introduces new challenges. Passive houses are basically airtight, which requires some kind of ventilation to not suffocate and prevent molding, while exchanging as less heat with the outside as possible.
@@D4BASCHTyeah, and ventilation systems can have about 90% heat recovery, so they're a lot better than having to open a window...
@@D4BASCHT I am facing this exact issue in Germany. The apartment is very well insulated, so I have to open the windows often to keep the humidity under 52%.
@@D4BASCHT Heat exchanging ventilation and air recirculation has been a thing for decades.
It's almost standard already in newly built low energy buildings in France.
@@Soken50 Yes, it’s neither an issue. I just wanted to say that it makes other things more complicated. It only becomes an issue for old houses who get their insulation improved, since you either need per room ventilation and drill multiple holes into the exterior wall or slit up the walls and put pipes into them to retrofit central ventilation.
In Germany, more people rent appartments than buying of building a house. For most middle class people, building a house is a "once in a lifetime" experience.
We sometimes have a basement. There is never that space to crawl under the house, it goes directly on the ground. If you place the concrete you leave spots where the electricity, water and Drainage goes in (you place wooden boxes before pouring in the concrete so that you dont have to cut it out later.
The Walls interior arent always made of stones. We do have dry construction too.
The brick Walls outside go from 37 cm up tu 45 cm depending on how much one is willing to spend. We sometimes also have "plastic" (Styropor) on the outside, that usually measures 8 cm and is there to keep the temperatures out
People usually build their houses to live their whole life in it. Sometimes life happens (divorce, lack of money...) and they have to move. But we search a Job near the home and not a home near the Job.
If you have a basement sometimes this is fully made of concrete... and sometimes by special bricks which is cheaper.
Houses in Germany and Austria usually musy be build to be energy efficient (we even give Energy ratings for buildings), must resist temperatures between -40 to +100°C and windspeeds up to 200hm/h. If those conditions are not met, you get problems with the regulators
I love your fascination with our German houses, but I have to note that the house shown in the video is just a "basic model". Most German houses have basements and are even more stable. In Germany there are construction engineers who statically calculate whether the house has been designed to be stable enough. After the calculations, the plan of the house goes to the building authority where the house is checked for hundreds of laws and only when everything is approved can the house be built. (Verifying the legality of the house can take several years. ) During construction, the house is inspected by the "building authority". Those were just a few facts... I hope this helps. Warm greetings from Germany🖐 (I really like your videos. They really helping me to improve my English knowledge.)
Yes, if you want a custom home, it can be expensive and take a long time to get approved. However, these complex approval procedures only apply to houses that are specifically built as individual copies. Most of the homes that are built are series homes that you choose from a catalog and have built. This eliminates the need for complex testing because the house series has already been tested and approved. It is only checked whether the specifications of the construction plans and statics are adhered to during construction.
Those are not German houses, popular technology everywhere in continental Europe apart of Scandinavia and UK
@@era3477 I never ruled out that this procedure is similar in other countries. So I can't understand why they feel so "attacked" now. This was just a report for those who don't know this from their home country.
@@era3477 Yes, exactly, you can't just refer to this construction method to Germany, in principle it applies to the whole of Europe that, apart from Scandinavia, stone construction was predominantly used. The materials that were regionally available were used. In rocky areas, limestone, sandstone, volcanic stone or granite stones were used. In areas without rocks, people took clay and to bake hard bricks in kilns. It was also logical that wood was used for building in northern Scandinavia. There were enough of them. But when I see a Scandinavian durable wooden house, there are huge differences to a US wooden house made of lightweight construction. My partner lives in Germany in a wooden house settlement that was built around 1900 by Finns for German Navy employees. These houses are still as strong and healthy as they were 120 years ago. The same applies to Swedish and Norwegian wooden houses, some of which are 200 or 300 years old. In principle, you cannot say that wooden houses are worse than stone houses. It depends on how you build them.
The fact that americans call plywood, plastic and some screws with a roof on it a 'house' baffled me when I found out as a teen. Brickhouses are build to withstand decades and even centuries and only need some new roofing and Windows after some time. I understand that americans build their 'houses'like this because it's cheaper to rebuild this way BUT even if tornados aren't frequent and usual in germany they CAN happen and after one his a smaller City, only the room and windows had some damage. In america the whole house would be GONE
We are living in a house that was built 200 yrs ago. Solid rock foundation, all brick and mortar for the exterior walls, wood beams and straw-clay fillings 'Fachwerk' for the interior walls. The wooden roof construction is 90% still the original beams. House got hit by a heavy storm last year, lost a few tiles in the roofing. Got them replaced and slotted back in. Repair took about an hour.
You do need a metric ton of WiFi Repeaters to get a signal across though. :)
Feeling you, living in a house built 500 yrs ago. The same case. You only have WiFi in adjacent room to the router.
The house in the video is an "El Cheapo" variant - without a cellar and a set up roof with no additional rooms there. A cellar would add at about +25 percent to the costs and is also made of a concrete bottom plate - and stone walls in most cases. If not concrete too. *These* people there will have little to no internal storage rooms as with a cellar (for heating, freezer, installation, sauna, air-raid bunker etc.). All will have to fit in the appartment(s). And no "dry space" for the washing under the roof. Moooh !
I live in a similar house (rented). We have a big garage instead of the cellar. Since we have a heatpump outside it doesn’t take up any space.
Yeah, agreed. This is actually a below-average variant for a family home in Germany. My grandparents' house (on my mother's side) actually had an additional insulating outer wall of bricks, but I'm not sure anymore which material it was. It also had a huge cellar with several rooms (for storage aswell as for the central heating system and for a hobby room with another smaller room attached for drying clothes during bad weather). So there are definitely more expensive versions of family homes out there.
Sorry they didn't build a cellar for you to imprison some girls from the neighborhood.
Cellars were built to store food and keep it cool. Nowerdays we have fridges and supermarkets, so nobody needs to build that expensive shit unless you really need a swimming pool every time there's heavy rain.
Drying your clothes under the roof is also a very stupid idea. There's a way better place for it called "outside".
It’s November in Cumbria and I live in a small coastal town. I live in a terraced house (row house) built in 1863. I haven’t yet had to use my central heating. The internal walls are all brick which have been plastered. I had my roof done 17 years ago when I extended into the attic, according to my deeds and all the records about my home apparently this was the first time my roof was touched since it was put on in 1863. Still have the original floor boards and the Victorian William Morris tiles. But I no longer use the fireplaces. They just look pretty.
The reason why the AI script constantly uses "it" is probably because they machine-translated a German script...
"It starts at the corners" for example seems like a very direct translation of "Es beginnt an den Ecken" or something similar. Which still is awkward phrasing but it's not uncommon to indirectly refer to a process in German as the subject by using the third person singular neuter "es", literally "it"...
If you get your hands on any serious teaching book or instructions how to build anything technical, that phrase "Es beginnt ...", like a bad written fantasy script ... you should demand your money back!:) And immediately inform the responsible craft guild should impose a contractual penalty and immediately throw the grammar offender out of the association. Why an A.I. does translate things the way they do is because there IS NO INTELLIGENCE at all. They probably(that word is even a hint, hehe) mix and hallucinate every kind of mismatched and unrelated information from their stolen sources into the result, we where witnesses of. So there is a high chance that the wording is really PART of some fairy tale or fantasy story. Shouldn't this be a warning sign? A really big red one warning sign!
In fact, those minutes we watched are a completely wasted time. We have to go through every single point and fact check that ... or just be stoopid as always and believe the nonsense that will hurt us later, when we make decisions based on our wrong understanding and half-knowledge, for example if someone decides to built a house and has this misinformation here as a background, transported by a non expert watching a video(!) and a effing A.I!. Of course that is unrealistic. Even the stupidest under us have to consult an expert and go through approval processes when building a house (fingers crossed! hehe).
@@dieSpinntObviously for technical manuals that isn't appropriate xD But I wouldn't be surprised if a professional wrote a TH-cam video script like that
@@dieSpinntIch glaube, Ihre Ansprüche an dieses Video sind etwas zu hoch.
A german house without a basement? That's really not typical.
It gets more usual, at least where I live, bc building a cellar has become ridiculously expensive, especially if the ground is a stone filled a-hole (we redid our garden and even there we had like 30cm of soil and everything below was just stones of varying size)
In Italy, an indipendent house like that can costs from 300k to 1M euros, depending on the luxury of the neighborhood and the distance from the connections to the center of the city (underground, bus stations, train stations)
You cannot find an house like that in the city, only in suburbs
To answer your tornado question: We had one a few years ago ripping through the city I'm living in. For the normal houses it were mainly the roofs that were effected by it. Some lost a few shingles, a few older houses had a semi collapsed roof. Unless a tree fell on it, the walls seemed to be all fine. I also didn't see shattered windows, as we mainly have three layered one these days.
In comparison, there was a furniture shop that kind of looked like a warehouse. The walls looked like they were build with sheets of tin. It was completely torn apart. The whole building was completely gone.
Tornados are extremely rare in Germany, but not actually nonexistent - one went through a couple of smaller towns near me a few years back. It actually mostly de-shingled some roofs and wrecked fences and stuff. Some buildings were damaged by falling trees and there were a lot of broken windows from airborne debris, but all in all, the towns were left standing.
You mention the three little pigs tale, at the beginning.
American houses are built like the second pig, European houses are built like the third. The tale is clear on which one is sturdier. The brick itself also helps with the insulation, which is why we rarely need AC in most places.
Although I'm not german, I would like to point out that this is the more modern house building. A century ago, they would be using actual stone, almost 50cm thick, for the outer walls in certain places.
And yet, our brick houses are not invincible. I lived in an area prone to flooding a while back, and every now and I remember once that a house had a large hole in one of its external walls because the flood went through it (insurance and the townspeople generosity helped getting that family back on their feet).
This construction method also answers the question why most houses in this regions don't come with airconditioning. The interior of these bunker houses remain cool for most of the summer.
Depends on the duration of heating days and the insulation of windows. Many people only invest for simple window insulation. When you have a heat period for a week and temperatures are even high at night, it's pretty warm inside.
I guess, we Germans and also majority of Europeans are building such houses to avoid fire scenarios like back in 14th till 20th century, when half of towns were destroyed by fires.
Just have a look how fires in Hawaii a few months ago erased some towns, because every single house ignited pretty fast and spread the fire to the next house.
Imagine these numbers in the past (lower population).
Bremen 1041 - majority of historic city destroyed
Vienna 1276 - 2/3 of town destroyed
Munich 1327 - 1/3 of town destroyed
Berlin (Center) 1378 & 1380 - majority destroyed
Einbeck 1540 - whole town erased
Arnstadt 1581 - 378 buildings destroyed
Madgeburg 1631 - 1500 buildings destroyed
Aachen 1656 - 4664 buildings destroyed
London 1666 - 13000 houses/87 churches destroyed
Oldenburg 1676 - just a few buildings left
And this is just till 17th century with larger town. Who knows how many more villages were destroyed by fire without being documented.
As long as you aren't running any electronic like computers but only for small rooms. I sadly don't have an extra room for my computer at the moment.
Not all German houses are built from pre-insulated bricks like that, in fact they seem to be quite a new kind of brick.
Our multi-family house (cellar, 2 regular stories and 1 story in the attic with sloped ceilings) was built in 1990 with “perforated” bricks (YTON).
Most houses today are still built with similar bricks and then heavily insulated outside.
Some inside walls are made out of drywall, mostly remodeled rooms and rooms below the attic.
Yes, construction methods are constantly changing as new building materials are constantly being invented. What has remained the same, however is, that the houses are still stone houses. My house, for example, dates back to the 1960s. The outer walls are made of sand-lime brick, which is clad on the outside with a layer of fired red bricks. There is rock wool insulation between the inner and outer parts of the different layers. The interior walls consist exclusively of plastered sand-lime brick. From the 1970s/80s onwards, sand-lime brick was often replaced by expanded concrete blocks (Yton), as this enabled faster and more cost-effective construction. However, I doubt that Yton houses will last as long as sand-lime brick houses.
Yton"Porenbeton" is a brigg with a lit of airbubbles in it. So it has a good insulatiin an compare to the clay brigg it can absorbe moisture.
The inside wall are mostly from "Kalksandstein" it is much heavier to insulate agains sound...and it is more concrete, so tge wall can be thinner
Der Punkt ist doch aber das in Deutschland üblicherwe mit Stein gebaut wird und in USA mit Holz und Pappe 😅 ist doch egal welche Art von Steinen.
these hollow briks are pretty much the norm for most type of normal houses for 1to 4 familys.
for bigger constructions u would use steel and concreate.
and some older buildings u can see full briks.
we also have ready houses. whole rooms,Walls will be delievered in one piece. So you can have a whole house in 3 days. inside the Walls Are made of Rigips, Pflaster of Paris...and when you knock hard on such a wall, there is hole in.
I live in a house that was built in 1901. Of course it was repeatedly renovated, new windows, new heating, etc. but the house is in excellent condition and will easily last another 100 years. When you build a house in Germany, it's so that your children's children can live in it too.
12:58 Here in germany there is a norm for everything. For example, there might be a bathroom on the upper floor and it might have a bathtub which usually holds 170 litres of water. Ad the person in the tub and the weight of the tub itself and you see why that concrete ceiling must be able to support a weight of 500kg/m2.
I live in Switzerland in the city of Basel, the oldest house still inhabited today was built in 1269. In the same street there are a dozen more houses that were built before the 1300s, and further up there are a few that were built around the 1400s Most of them are inhabited or used as small shops.
I mean Swiss Houses are beasts. I dunno anyone that does construction as rediculously expensive as we do. I'd really wanna see Americans react to our construction.
funny how a lot of inhabitated houses in the EU are older than the USA :D
to be fair: while we do build solid houses, the methods have changed a lot. They had no steel concrete and laser measurements in the 13th century.
And also, survivor bias: over 99% of the 13th century houses were STILL destroyed.
If you think that's a castle, then you should look how Greek houses are made. Have in mind that Greece (and I'm pretty sure Italy and other Mediterranean countries as well) has no tornados but a lot of seismic activity instead, so the buildings are constructed able to endure earthquakes of high magnitude. The concrete and iron underground foundation alone can be almost as deep as the height of the whole building sometimes. My house is made in the late '50s and has concrete pillars 50cm X 50cm all around that start 3,5 m underground, and a ceiling 40 cm thick, so during the 1999 Athens earthquake of 5,9 R the only damage I had was two books that had fallen down from the bookshelf.
This! I was so confused by the lack of appropriate foundations. A house getting built here in Portugal starts with a deep hole to lay the foundations.
My house, built in 2005, has a full basement! The floor slab (156m²) in the basement is made of steel-reinforced solid concrete. The thickness is between 25-30cm. In the area of the chimney, the foundation was reinforced to support the weight of the double chimney (height from the base plate 12m). I built the outside walls in the basement with 36cm thick concrete blocks! The masonry is plastered inside and out! The outer wall, if it is underground, was coated with a sealant and additionally covered with studded mats to protect against moisture. The room height in the basement is 280cm because I wanted to have a hobby workshop, a guest room and a bathroom with a toilet! The rest is a storage room, a utility room, a technical room with heating and a tank room. Cold protection insulation was laid between the concrete slab and the screed.
The ground floor was built with 40cm thick Poroton stones (honeycomb clay stones)! These stones have good insulation and moisture diffusion properties! The room height is identical to the basement. The false ceilings are made of 20cm thick reinforced concrete. A combined impact sound and cold protection insulation was installed between the concrete ceiling and screed. The attic has the same ceiling height and is fully usable in the dormer area. The knee height for the roof beams is 130cm. The stage above the attic has a ceiling height of 225cm and could be used as additional living space by extending the dormer window. The roof beams are completely boarded and have 18cm thick insulation. The roof was covered with heavy concrete tiles. The shell construction and interior work were carried out entirely by the family (my father was a master bricklayer)! The electrical work was planned and carried out by my father-in-law, for example 1,800m of empty pipe was installed in the ceilings and walls to meet current and future requirements. The house is heated with a combined thermal solar-oil central heating. In addition, the heating system is supported by a tiled stove on each floor. Two of the tiled stove wood burner inserts are directly integrated into the central heating system using a water pocket.
I have to say that the high construction costs have made these dimensions almost impossible. Even back then, this was only possible with the active support of the family. I was fortunate to have some professionals among friends and family. In the Swabian house-building region, this was not uncommon at the time. Unfortunately, a lot has changed here in the last few years. New houses are mostly prefabricated houses produced by the industry, which are also completely assembled by assembly companies. Fewer and fewer young people have the courage and technical skills to carry out such projects. The new houses are increasingly being built without basements and smaller, depending on the financial and personal effort! The basementless buildings can be recognized after a few years by the amount of additional storage sheds that have been built around the house.
Punshing into a wall in Germany, when being frustrated or angry, is not the best idea :D
A fun fact about those bricks and AC, my parents built their house in 2001, using bricks of course. The mineral whool filling does a great job when it comes to holding temperatures. In summer even when we hit like 30 deg Celsius, inside you almost need to wear a sweater bacause it can actually get chilly. in winter we can heat the entire house with a 10kw fireplace (using wood) for like 3hrs and it stays comfortably warm for the next 12 to 16 hrs, depending on the outside temperature. In very cold winters with minus 20 deg Celsius it didn't last as long. Still this way of building is really efficient and sometimes makes AC's kind of unnecessary :D
Well, a house in Germany costs around 2 times what a house costs in the US.
But even that is a scam to ask so much for a house made of toothpicks, cardboard and (plastic!?!) paneling!!
To call them "Houses" in the U.S. is a joke ! 😂😂
Building with hollow blocks is practically the standard in Germany, but prefabricated wooden components have been established for years, especially for single-family houses and, for example, house extensions such as additional floors.
There are various companies that specialize in creating absolutely precisely fitting individual elements that are then literally puzzled together. Very special filling material is often used that is blown into holes in the walls and creates extremely good insulation. This makes the entire construction relatively light but also very stable, so that the lower house structure is subjected to less strain, especially when adding more storeys. Maybe you can also find good video material to explain it.
Funny thing: in some countries we pour out of concrete even the corners of all the rooms, with steel reinforcement included, and concrete beams above all openings (doors, windows, etc.). As of price - a ~400 sqm home, 3 floors, 12 rooms, 6 bathrooms, 3 hall ways, extra deep foundation, staircase (also out of reinforced concrete) build this way is in my country ~ 150k - 250k Euros (depending on materials used, and less if you can do PM-ing yourself). Expensive materials come from isolation and special bricks. Time needed to finish ~ 2 months (most time in concrete drying :) )
The forgot the cellar! Basically every house i jor friends) owned had a cellar under the whole house, made out of concrete. It’s needed for all the stuff you don’t want to clutter up your home, the heating and the obligatory small workshop to repair things 😁
well, in northern germanys coastregion there are rarley basements because the ground is to soft and to wet. So its a regional thing.
@@hegamona2864 depends. I‘m quite often in the north, last time in horumersiel as an example, and there was a basement (in fact even a studio basement) there. Cheaper houses (and in regions with very wet ground) obviously don’t have cellars, but i think most houses in Germany hav3 them…
uh, horumersiel, my region. sure, we have basements there, rarley. but they are often a trouble. right now im in the black forest and ive never seen a house without a basement, while up north its more common. Guess it depents on the one who commisioned the house. @@erebostd
@@erebostd older houses yes. Newer ones use them less than before since a basement in the wet ground is more expensive to build than just having the same space in 1st floor and 2nd floor. Safety regulations to prevent water damage are really expensive. I still want one. If I ever in my life get enough money to buy one. Not too likely with nowadays prices and salary. Working in the natural science department.
I can only dream of having working conditions like the deutsche bahn train drivers. I work more for less salary and have to do overwork a lot more frequently than the lowest level of train divers there. At least I'm already far above average on salary in my company where we create newest technology genetically modified immune system cells to treat cancer.
No longer the norm. The house I live in has a garage instead. As for heating: the heat pump is outside anyway.
Whole Europe is built like that. Houses can last hundreds of years.
As a German, I've always wondered why houses in America are made of cardboard and paper... there are tornadoes, hurricanes, etc... can someone enlighten me?😅
You can find a video of a T4 Tornado going through a Czech village here on youtube, the only damage done is to some roofs being lifted off and windows shattering from debris.
The more modern houses can even survive a Tree being thrown at them by a Tornado, as they are made from rebar concrete and modern insulation, you could drive a train into them and they´d still be standing mostly.
We do have Tornadoes here in germany as well, but they rarely do extensive damage and don´t get as big as compared to America, due to terrain and the way we build.
In the Netherlands the construction is fairly similar with the exception that in the west we first have to drill large concrete poles in the ground so the houses don’t sink in the marshy/clay/peat soil. The average length of these poles is 5-10 meters (16-32ft) but can be over 30m long, before they hit a solid sand layer.
U heeft paalfundering , in België wordt dit gebruikt als men op een kleibodem bouwt , in onze streek hebben we zowel een klei als zand ondergrond , ik heb het geluk dat ik in een duinenregio zit en mijn huis enkel een ringfundering benodigd van 70 cm tot een meter.
@@sergevereecke680 Klopt, we noemen ze hier heipalen. In België ook?
M’n huidige huis staat ook op duinzand, maar m’n vorige huis amper 10 km verderop stond op klei grond en had heipalen van 11 meter.
@@sergevereecke680 Dank DEEPL dat ik je beter heb kunnen begrijpen: You have pile foundation , in Belgium this is used when building on a clay soil , in our region we have both clay and sand soil , I am fortunate to be in a dune region and my house only requires a ring foundation from 70 cm to a meter.
@@anouk6644 Dank DEEPL dat ik je beter kon begrijpen - zoals je zei: True, we call them piles here. In Belgium too?
My current house is also on dune sand, but my previous house barely 10 km away was on clay soil and had piles of 11 meters.
I'd like to add this: In the 1980s in Idar-Oberstein/Germany, I was shown a building built over a swamp for which a kind of hemispherical concrete basin had to be poured under the foundation before a building permit could be issued. I think that this added a high percentage to the actual construction costs.
The other exception is that we put a ton of conduits and junction boxes for the electrical installation, ventilation ducts and sewage pipes on the concrete floor in between the rebar before they pour it.
In Germany, labour costs are pretty high, because of taxes and mandatory insurances. You have to pay about 6k+ for a worker with a 2k monthly salary. Thats the reason why automation, modularization and standardization is such a big thing here. It may seem counterintuitive, but using more expensive prefabricated Elements might save a lot of money, because it reduces the amount of manual labour needed by a lot. A german crew framing wooden walls out of some bendy timber, sheething, insulating, drywalling an putting siding on, will much likely be a lot more expensive than just putting some rows of insulated bricks on top of each other and fill some concrete in.
An average ceiling for a 10m x 10m house weighs around 50 tons ;) there are 2 of them, the floor slab itself weighs another around 60 tons and the masonry + plaster + roof 100 tons. So a normal small German house weighs about 250 tons ^^
In Germany we don't frequently get tornadoes but we do get very strong winds that are called Orkan. Those can rip out trees and cause general mayhem, so buildings still need to be sturdy.
To watch Ryan is like observing a kid that is just discovering the world.
Wir alle kennen die Videos wo jemand mit der Faust ein Loch in ein Gipskarton " Wand" kloppt.
Das kann man gerne mal hier probieren.Alles gute bei der Heilung, der Gebrochenen Knochen.
😂😂😂
Bei einem alten Fachwerkhaus mit lehmwänden gibt es nur blutige Knöchel nach einem ordentlichen Schlag
@@deathtrooper7760 Tooooll 🤦♀
In Germany we put plaster and antimycotic paint on inside walls, or wallpaper, and whitewash over brickwork in cellars. Usually, the concrete of the floor is covered by either a wooden plank floor on top or by wall to wall carpets glued to the concrete... or in cheaper apartments, floor screed is used. In kitchens and bathrooms, screed or stone floor tiles are common, with glazed ceramic tiles on the walls in places you expect a lot of water platter from showering or moisture from cooking.
American houses, made of wood, to us they look like garden houses 😂😂 ...
Greetings from Germany
We live in a former farmhouse in Germany that was originally build in 1806. Okay -- modernized several times, energetically upgraded, but still -- 2 1/2 feet of brick walls indeed a build to last. And while we rarely have tornados (but increasingly so) we do have the occasional hurricane grade winter storm. Usually we merely loose a few roof shingles (heavy duty clay thingsthat weigh about 10 lbs each) during one of those.
Nein, wir haben auch heute keine Tornados oder Hurrikane. Das ist eine ganz andere Liga.(Nicht alles glauben, was die linksgrünen Journalisten so labern.)
Hello german dude here =D Just so you know how far german house-building has come... My dad added 4 rooms to our house when i was a child about 23 years ago, with some old army friends who became masons. The addition to the house has been certified to survive a crash from a small airplane. And there is pretty much no spots in a german-build house you cant park a heavy duty pickup without causing damage to the stability of the house.
triple-negative? Difficult, difficult 🤔
But you could also park an pickup in the upper floors, if you could get it there 😂
11:50 some houses in Germany still are built with timber-frames instead of burnt hollow clay bricks (or sand-lime bricks). Indeed, Germany has seen a little renaissance of modular, fast-to-built timber-frame houses in recent years in some areas.
a well insulated Home (thick walls triple layer Windows,...) not only keeps noise out... but also in. May it playing Children, loud singing or a Couples private time.... a good insulation filters alot of Noise.
We generally prefer to have a full basement. Building a house on a concrete slab without a basement is chosen for financial reasons only. There is no crawl space underneath. All the plumbing and electrical connections are in the soil under the slab and penetrate through the slab into the house (when there's a basement, the generally enter it through the wall). The underground installation is designed to keep functional without maintenance for the lifetime of the house, which easily is 200 years. It has to be designed that way because you can't get down there and repair it.
A brick house is able to withstand tornados without collapsing. There will be a lot of damage especially to the roof, but the masonry and concrete will sustain the tornado almost undamaged. It's easier to repair than to start from scratch.
A huge advantage of these thick, hollow bricks is, they offer perfect insulation. The house needs no additional wall insulation.
The reinforced concrete ceilings are very strong. For example, you can place a fish tank up to 450 liters (100 US gallons) wherever you want.
Not every German house is designed that way. There are different styles of wooden construction too. From almost American style wooden framing to solid(!) wooden walls. Wooden houses usually have wooden ceilings. The so called Fertighaus (ready built house) uses wooden framing too. It comes in large, factory-made parts that barely fit on a truck and gets assembled by crane within a day or two. Almost everything needed is pre-installed in the parts, you can move in as soon as the crane finished work.
There are hybrid designs too, with outer walls in stone masonry and internal walls made from lightweight wooden framing and wooden ceilings. You can get what you want as long as it's structurely sound and fits the energy efficiency requirements.
the fzcks a crawlspace,, why do we need to be crawling there😂😂
In France, american houses are illegal to build. They don't have all the fire security measures.
Aside of that you are not allowed to build houses with "very low thermic insulation".
When I went to the US, I was afraid to break the walls by just pushing on them. You don't have that fear in european houses as they are built correctly!
And no our houses are not made to survive nuclear attack, just more than 20 years...
Houses here are hell expensive
and the Swiss build a cellar and in such a way that it can also be used as a bunker to provide protection in the event of war, with extra-reinforced walls and doors
I have one :)
12:00 I built playgrounds, treehouses and stuff like that for nearly 10 years, mostly in Germany. On most of the construction sites we had at least once one of those big mobile cranes. Those crane operators are a special breed. They belong to the most chilled and most professional people I ever had the pleasure to work with.
Btw.. we have Tornados in Germany... think they are a little smaller, than in the US usually... but as our houses are build like this and you also have integrated blinds on the windows. During "a storm" we just go inside and close the blinds... most of the time nothing happens... rarely a few tiles from the roof are blown off - that's it.