There are a lot of things about these houses that are pretty poor quality, starting with the cheap plastic plumbing sticking out of the wall at every plumbing fixture. But this house is still the strongest house I've ever lived in. It's much better built than my 1990 brick ranch house in Houston that survived two Cat-5 hurricanes without a scratch. With wind-rated double-pane windows, steel studs, and concrete block walls, this house seems likely to survive at least a century longer than I need it, hurricane or not. It's certainly built better than the home where I started out -- a two-bedroom 1910 Craftsman, with knob-and-tube wiring, asbestos siding, cast iron plumbing, coal-fired floor furnace, and no air conditioning, in tornado-alley Wichita. And yet I can go on Google Maps and see that house standing to this day. It's outlived the giant elm trees that used to line that street when I was a kid, by at least 50 years.
|