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When I was a kid I was really confused by Jerry. How could he make a home inside a wall like that? The walls are completely solid, with bricks and mortar. I had to move to Canada to understand that the walls are hollow and the house is made from wood, plaster, plastic and styrofoam.
Where did all your pipes and wiring go? What insulates the building?
You don't need any of that nonsense. Real men insulate themselves with their feelings. As for electricity, I make that myself. They don't call me the love dynamo for no reason.
Pipes are installed before the mortar (I think that’s the name), sometimes carving bricks. Wires pass inside flexible tubes (literally translated to conductors). This has the advantage that, if the tube is wide enough, we can pass more wires.
"Conduit" is the word for those tubes for wires. Probably a shared etymology with "conductor" though.
Having the pipes in the mortar/bricks sounds like a maintenance nightmare.
Ah, so it’s the same name in Portuguese. Conduítes.
Yeah... I didn't get homes elsewhere having ventilation until I realized that it's too cold in a lot of places to just open the window (at least I think that's why vents exist, if not, please enlighten me)
I was so confused too as a Brit since our houses are made of brick and mortar. I still find it weird that houses in NA are made out of wood and plasterboard/drywall
When wood is cheaper then rocks you make things out of wood.
Then you get in the habit of using wood.
Then it doesn't matter what happens, you keep using wood cause fuck changing shit.
We have earthquakes here. Plaster and bricks are great for insulating, but they crumble when the ground shakes.
Wall voids are extremely common in older brick buildings. In the case of my house and many others there's an intentional void that is also used as a massive ac duct.
The 100 years old brick buildings don't have any voids. That only started post-WWII when ventilation became a real concern.
But even then those houses are likely to have wooden floors and more modern drywall remodeling in some areas. My house is hurricane-proof but not rat-proof.
My house is brick, built in 1925 and has wall voids, you're simply wrong.
It does have wood floors with 10" wide rough cut planking and has not been remodeled, that's why I bought it.
Just as reference there are ancient Greek buildings with cavity walls, this argument is dumb.
I guess Greek house building was several decades ahead of Belgian house building then, because I've yet to see a pre-war house with cavity walls. I guess the cheap coal heating and lack of a need for cooling must have something to do with it.
Regional variations exist and in some places or fell out of habit completely, just not in the US and honestly most of the Americas.