Wooden houses: will there be more of them

Gusevsky Andrey Anatolyevich

Modern wooden house

Oddly enough, in Russia, which ranks second after Brazil among the leaders in world timber reserves (82 billion m3) and produces more than 40 million cubic meters a year of this valuable natural material, there are problems with wooden housing construction.

Although wood was originally used in our house for the construction of houses, today wooden houses make up only 12% of its total housing. And this, despite the many advantages of wood over any other structural material. So what's the deal?

Wood situation

The choice of wood as a material for building houses in past centuries was primarily explained by its accessibility, since most of the country's territories are covered with forests. The second selection criterion was the thermotechnical properties of wood, which distinguished it from stone or brick that appeared later.

It's a shame that today wood is more a subject of trade, and is exported unprocessed abroad. Accumulations of road trains and trains at the borders are by no means a rare phenomenon.

Raw wood is exported.

Yes, and what to be surprised? All these perestroika of the 90s ruined not one enterprise in the country, and woodworking factories were no exception. It has already become a tradition for us to make money by increasing only timber exports. And this despite the fact that building wood in domestic markets is constantly increasing in price!

Meanwhile, in the countries of Europe, which, even all taken together, do not possess such timber reserves as Russia, wooden houses account for almost half of all housing construction. In Canada - and even more - up to 70%. Well, what are we worse than we are?

How to get things off the ground

The Ministry of Industry and Trade of the Russian Federation believes that it is possible to develop the timber industry only with the popularization of wooden housing construction. Therefore, it was decided to rely on the complete production of houses, which will not only significantly reduce the cost of a finished house, improve the quality of housing, but also significantly reduce the time spent on its construction.

Kit for the construction of a wooden house: numbered blanks are cut to size, selected mounting grooves

The ministry plans to increase the gross product of the forest industry, oriented to the domestic market by 2030, by 50%. All these measures should lead to the fact that wooden houses will begin to be built not only in the regions of the Central Federal District, which account for the lion's share of all wooden housing, but also in other regions of the country.

Varieties of building wood

Today, in our country houses are being built from five types of building timber:

1. Manually cut logs;

Log cabin

2. Logs rounded in production;

Log house

3. Planed timber;

Walls of planed timber

4. One-piece profile bar;

Log from a solid profiled beam

5. Glued profile beam;

The section shows the layer structure of glued beams

In the above photos, you see what is the visual difference between them. Now let's see what characteristics construction wood is different from.

Characteristics

About the advantages and disadvantages of wooden houses

The advantages of wooden houses include the speed of walling, the need for insulation and finishing. It is also important that the human factor here practically does not affect the quality of the structure - it is enough to be able to use carpentry tools.

• If you still need to insulate the walls, or the owner wants to sheathe them with some other decorative material, the installation of the frame is facilitated by the possibility of using any fasteners, without the need for drilling and driving dowels.
• One square of the wall of glued beams, which is the most expensive in the list of building lumber, costs, along with antiseptic treatment, about 5500 rubles.
• A brick wall with external insulation with a thickness of 510 mm will cost almost the same amount. And given that it still needs to be trimmed from the inside, the amount will increase significantly. As for the laboriousness of masonry and plastering processes, then for brickwork this is the most painful topic.

Against the background of continuous advantages, the disadvantages of wood are not so significant.

Note! The tree shrinks, and therefore it is not recommended to decorate wooden houses earlier than a year after the construction of the log house. And if you use the same glued beam in construction, then there will be practically no shrinkage. And its strength is much higher than that of solid wood lumber.

Wood has two more minuses: a possible change in the appearance of the walls due to fungus, and the combustibility of the material. But they seem insignificant, thanks to modern impregnations and primers with fire-protective properties.

In favor of wooden houses is the fact that the laying of communications in them is carried out with the least financial investment. Indeed, in a house whose walls are built of materials with weak bearing capacity: hollow ceramic blocks, cellular concrete - even hanging furniture cabinets becomes a problem.

You can decorate wooden walls as soon as you like. Take the same thread: if earlier woodcarvers had to work by hand, today, having a milling tool on hand, you can quickly create ornaments worthy of admiration.

And there are a lot of interior design options, including not only modern, but also historically developed ones. So, making a decision: what to build your house from, we highly recommend that you turn your attention to wood.