The world seems to be rediscovering wood as a building material. News about increasingly taller wooden buildings can be found almost daily. This shouldn't surprise us because wood is a natural, renewable and recyclable material used for thousands of years for construction.
It is true that technologies have changed, and the wood used is no longer a log brought from the forest and roughly processed but industrialized wood to make it much more resistant.
Wood is gaining ground even among those who are building their own homes. Wood house construction in Romania has been on a continuous upward trend for several years. This is because there are manyadvantages when it comes to wooden house construction. Below are just a few of them.
Shorter and cleaner construction site
Wooden frame houses do not use concrete or other wet materials. They are made from frames of posts and beams, reinforced back-to-back with structural panels. This forms a parallelepiped box considered by architects and builders to be one of the most resistant shapes, very difficult to deform.
These frames form the walls and floors of the house, and the advantage is that they can be made in a factory and only assembled on site. This significantly shortens construction time, a 100 m² single-story house can be erected in less than a week.
Construction time is also shorter because no materials are used that require time to harden and dry. There is no concrete, cement, mortar, and their absence means a cleaner construction site because formwork and hardened material waste disappear.
The cleanliness of the construction site is also contributed by the fact that most of the work is done in the constructor's factory, the resulting elements being processed to the millimeter so that the joints are perfect.
Simpler foundation, larger usable area and earthquake resistance
The common denominator of these advantages is wood, which is a strong but lightweight material. For example, spruce wood used in construction has a specific weight of 410 kg/mc, while concrete is between 2200 and 2400 kg/mc. Thus, using wood will result in a house 3-4 times lighter than one made of concrete or brick.
Therefore, there will be no need for a complicated foundation, but a simpler and cheaper one.
