Gibb makes an excellent point about the distinction between permanent and
impermanent structures. If you expect your land to be worn out in a
generation, then twenty years is your frame of reference for permanence.
 
Everything wooden will rot. Even salt-treated pole barns (or my backyard
shed) will rot eventually. But if a thirty-year-old farmer builds a pole
barn today of treated posts, he does not expect to replace it during his
lifetime. It depends upon your frame of reference, which is tempered by our
extended life expectancy.
 
In Iceland, where semi-subterranean turf houses remain in use, there is a
certain amount of rot. Turf houses traditionally were periodically rebuilt,
re-using whatever wood had survived from the previous house. They simply
raised the stone sidewalls, buried the less useful parts of the previous
structure, and built a new wooden frame on top of the old house. One old
source refers to building houses inside their fathers' houses, meaning that
they were creating layer-cake successions of houses that archaeologists
love to excavate.
 
So I don't think rot is as important as termites and other climate related
influences on building technology. Termites will accelerate the rot process
and create problems for the homeowner that would not have existed in a
termite-free environment. By the same token, the Finn or Swede on the
Delaware (or the Chesapeake for that matter) would find that the typical
cozy Nordic turf house was not as permanent or as cozy as the ones back
home.
 
A log house, on the other hand, is quite permanent in our Middle Atlantic
climate, if it is ventilated underneath and if it is kept dry above. So is
it surprising that log construction became so common in the Delaware valley
by the middle of the eighteenth century? While log construction was
possibly a Nordic housing type, it required logs and considerable labor,
and was not going to be as snug and cozy as a pit house.
 
In treeless Iceland and other northern islands, the idea of a log house
would have been out of the question from a materials viewpoint, but also
because of comfort. A turf house is an exceptionally warm home, even in the
hurricane-force winds of an Icelandic winter that would blow away a log or
frame house.
 
This latitudinal and climatic dislocation deserves consideration. I firmly
believe that all the European house types were tested in the American
environment and the best-adapted survived.
 
 
    _____
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|Baby the\                 Ted Kocszynski is to terrorism
|1969 Land\_===__
|  ___Rover   ___|o        (You have 18 years to figure that out.)
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