Wooden house

The advantages of a wooden house over a house built with the traditional combination of brick and concrete are basically:

• The speed of construction;
• The possibility of working in restricted spaces and with cranes of limited capacity;
• The lightness- and so possibility of not encumbering the foundations; 

• Cleanliness on the construction site; 

• Design flexibility;

• Predetermined price with certainty.

The disadvantages for those who decide to build a wooden house are 

• Difficulty in selling the house in the future: the buyer may not appreciate the fact that it was built in wood;
• Difficulty in making changes during construction.

However, the first one cannot be considered a real "problem": the resistance to building or living in a wooden house is due to the prejudices of a large part of the population towards this type of construction, which increase as the latitude decreases. Some have dubbed it "the three little pigs syndrome". That is why you may find it difficult to sell your house if the buyer is not a connoisseur of timber construction systems. 

The second problem is irrelevant for a German who decides on every last detail of a project and then doesn't change his mind, but it is rather distressing for us who are used to deciding until the last minute on the positions of walls, electrical sockets, doors... Prefabricated timber construction does not allow these 'last minute decisions' because it works on the basis of different concepts: you think and decide during the project phase and then respect the choices made. It is therefore important to have clear ideas and to refine every detail during the design phase.

How many wooden houses are built in Italy? 

According to the fifth "Wooden Houses Report" produced by Assolegno, the trend in the wood construction sector is growing in 2019 with a 2.3% increase in production. The turnover of Italian wooden houses exceeds 1.35 billion euros. The number of wooden houses built in Italy was 3,300 and the share of wooden houses reaches 7% of total building permits. 

Where are wooden houses built?

The regions where most wooden houses are built are those in northern Italy, in particular Lombardy, Veneto, Friuli, Alto Adige and Emilia Romagna (where there has been a sharp increase after the earthquake).
In the central-southern regions the market is growing, but the share of wooden buildings is still low compared to the total built up area.

One of the advantages we have mentioned is lightness. In fact, a wooden house is much lighter than a brick house: the specific weight of wood is about 500 kg/m3, about one fifth of reinforced concrete, which weighs about 2,500 kg/m3. This gives an idea of how much less the load on the foundations is. The handling and movement of materials on site is also made easier. All assembly and erection operations can be carried out with the crane mounted on the transporting truck or with a small construction crane.

It is well known that wood has a very low environmental impact compared to other construction techniques we are used to. Building a wooden house, in fact, means "imprisoning" CO2 that the trees have captured instead of pouring it back into the environment. It also means giving landowners an incentive to plant trees if the demand for wood increases. Of course: the wood has to be FSC-certified, i.e. from cultivation, and there has to be a guarantee that more trees will be replanted than will be cut down.
But we have noticed another advantage when working on wooden house construction sites: the production of waste on site is drastically reduced. While a lot of waste is produced in traditional building construction (some of it, unfortunately, also takes the form of cement or chemical seepage into the ground), very little waste is produced on the building site in the case of prefabricated timber construction! This means lower disposal costs for builders and another favour we are doing Mother Nature by choosing a wooden house.

The speed of construction is incredible when building with wood. If well planned, construction takes place extremely quickly and eliminates the possibility of rain permeating the floors and walls (typical of brick houses) which then, as we know, takes months to dry.

The fixed price is another good reason for choosing a wooden house: the estimate is complete and detailed and the last line contains the exact amount the customer will have to pay. No surprises, no overruns, no mortgage surcharges. These are all things that may seem strange to you, because whoever builds a house usually knows that they will overrun the estimate by at least 30%.
This is linked to the disadvantage of not allowing decisions to be made in the course of construction: every move of walls, doors, position of installations, etc. generates extra costs which, in the case of timber construction, will not be incurred.