Are all houses built in USA single brick as depicted in allot of movies?

Canadian answer:

The vast majority of houses in Canada are wood framed. 2x4" studs, placed 16" apart. The roof beams are trusses, typically made from 2x4's, or 2x6's. The house will sit on a cement pad, or, more usually, have a poured cement basement.

The inside will be clad in "Gyproc" sometimes called sheetrock. This is a hard plaster like stuff with a paper backing. Inside will be insulation - often fibreglass. In northern areas, walls are often thicker to allow more insulation. The outside of houses will oven be aluminum, or vinyl siding. More expensive houses will have a single layer of bricks, or 1/2 bricks, but, this is for decoration mostly.

There are differences - older houses, e.g. Georgian, and so on (up to the 1940's or so) were often brick, but, that is just too expensive now. Bricks are terrifically expensive, as are brick layers. Wood is plentiful in Canada!

On the west coast, Cedar planking is often used to siding, and Cedar shakes (shingles) for the roof.

I live in the Yukon, where it is cold. Many houses here are made of logs, and roofed with tin. The tin is to prevent fires, as most houses have wood heat, although they may have other fuels as well. Houses in the Maritimes tend to be sided with wood, and are often painted in bright colours.

Where I am, the ground is Permafrost, which means it is permanently frozen. So, there are no basements - in fact, homes are placed on wooden beams, so that they are above the ground. They are then vented underneath. The heat of a house too low, or, on the ground will melt the ground underneath, and the house will sink. And, due to extreme heating costs, most houses here are very small.

Here is the link for the Canadian Home Builder's Association. I've never been to the site, but, you might find interesting info there!

http://www.chba.ca/

It all depends on the builder, and the part of the country. Where there is cold weather in the

winter, you will find houses built with better insulation Whether or not a house has brick on

the outside, is up to the builder, and often the buyer. If he orders it as a trim, the price is

raised by the builder. Many homes are built with a stucco exterior. I have found them in

California, Florida, and Texas.. and Arizona. It holds up to the element of heat, better than

wood siding. All brick homes are well known in Texas. They serve to insulate the houses

there, and holds in the coolness. All homes have air conditioning there. Swamp coolers

are refrigeration with a water hose that makes a cooling breeze. Just the same, but the

cost is much less than an A/C unit. So brick houses are not the commono dwelling, and

where you find them, they are usually much more expensive that a wooden shake and

shingle home.

Can't see any reason why there wouldn't be double/full/cavity brick houses in the US.

I'm in NSW and in my suburb there is a mix of double brick, brick veneer, weatherboard (both hardiplank and timber), fibro, granosite, hebel etc, and on both slabs and piers. A lot of older houses are double brick because that's how they did it back then. Then you have the fibro houso joints, because they are cheaper. Weatherboards were a cheaper alternative to brick veneer. My house has a double brick ground floor with a brick veneer first floor (on a slab).

The same could be said for any area in the US that has had property built over a long period of time - different styles and building materials go through stages of being popular and unpopular, and socioeconomic factors always play a part on what people use to build their homes with, plus there are always people trying to be different and using different methods. Then there's the suitability of the building materials to the weather to consider.

Personally, when I think of US houses, I think of two-storey timber/weatherboard places with panelled windows, shutters, attics, basements etc (possibly more stereotypical of north-eastern US?). But there are a lot of areas where their houses are just like any suburb in Australia (thinking Arizona, off the top of my head).

Re your Everybody Loves Raymond reference, the construction style would also have played a big part in playing out the incident (i.e. a car can crash through brick veneer more easily than double brick), so there's that aspect to consider as well. And Long Island is on the East Coast :-)

I live in the NE USA and my house is brick & block. Most of the houses surrounded my condominium are wood framed. Most cheaper houses up here have ugly vinyl siding, but the nicer ones have wood or fiber cement with a swath of brick or stone here and there. While some American houses appear cheap and flimsy, many of them are stronger than they look, depending on the area. Hurricane zones require reinforcements in either wood or masonry buildings to make their storm resistance approximately equal, though masonry has the advantage against projectile damage. In calmer areas, the standards are much lower; that's were you get some houses with plasterboard on the inside and foam then vinyl siding on the outside, so you could actually cut through the wall with a box cutter. Amazingly, in many places these houses are sufficient, though I wouldn't want to live in one. The one category where many American houses fall flat is fire resistance. We have strict fire codes in the big cities and in the South West, but elsewhere, there are plenty of places were flammable vinyl sided boxes with vented attics are jammed into a small space and fire can jump from one house to the next. English houses appear much more solid and look a lot better to my eyes, but they've had their compromises as well. Some from the '70s and '80s have inside walls that are nothing but cardboard webbing sandwiched between 2 layers of plasterboard. Many of the newer houses have brick exteriors, but aerated concrete blocks actually supporting the wall. Some are even wood. And if you want a very strange chapter of construction history, do a web search on Bungaroosh. In the long run, even the cheesiest houses in the US or Europe are "built to last", at least in the sense that if they are maintained, they last indefinitely. Some even get added internal and external layers during renovations that make them appear much more substantial in their old age than they were when new.

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RE:

Are all houses built in USA single brick as depicted in allot of movies?

In the movie with Kevin Kline - "Life as a House", he built a house of all wood on ? the west coast of USA, In "Everybody Loves Raymond" which is set on Long Island (west coast USA) when Frank Barone accidentally drove through Ray and Debra's front door (season 5 episode 3)...

Long Island is on the east coast, not the west coast.

Asbestos used to be used in the U.S. for insulation and fire prevention, but is no longer used for health reasons.

The foundations of houses are usually cinderblock.

The rest of the house is typically wood frame for structure, with plasterboard for the inner walls and an exterior of either stucco or wood, which is often covered in siding made of aluminum or vinyl, to eliminate the need for frequent repainting.

Due to problems with bricks separating from each other in earthquakes, California has starting requiring brick walls to be heavily reinforced with metal.

There are lots of houses built with Bricks of any kinds..and also out of rocks. Most foundations are concrete as well as basements made with concrete..In the USA we have ALL KINDS of houses. I don't live on the coast I live in the middle of the US. Soil can be anywhere from sand,to hard mud to just plain old dirt! depend on where you live..Usually the walls are sheetrocks or plasters...Some will have stone walls but it depend on how they had their houses designed.. but as for the Double Bricks I don't think all of them are like that but I have seen pictures of real brick walls inside some penthouses..Good question!

Believe Larry, we have a huge variety of homes brick, stick (wood) cement, people build what they want to live in as they can afford. Basements in some areas of the country are considered a necessity as we have tornadoes, other parts of the country have row houses with a common wall, most houses now have drywall inner walls. Ignore the sarcasm and mean replies.

Almost all houses built in the US are wood frame houses. The outside veneer can be wood,brick, vinyl,stucco,etc. None of them are built to last like older homes were built.

Older houses that were built out of solid brick or stone and were much stronger than today's homes.

My son is like you & I wish he was available to answer you. Most are only veneer but there are brick & cinder block. I don't want to answer anymore cause I am not an expert but I remember when I sold home insurance hearing that houses just were not brick. So I am confused.

If you have e-mail & don't get your answer I will make a note to get him to answer you. You will have met your match with him. He is a construction project manager. He has an MBA & all kinds of other degrees & certifications. Most of all he loves all of this as you obviously do.