Before you start building a country house, you must, first of all, clearly define what to build it from, what building material – wood or stone.
Undoubtedly, a house built of wood will have a unique and original look. Wood is an easy-to-work, environmentally friendly material. A wooden house will have not only an elegant and noble look, but will also perfectly retain heat in winter and keep cool in summer. Despite a large number of advantages, wooden houses have a number of disadvantages. The main disadvantages include high flammability in case of fire, susceptibility of wood to atmospheric influences, low resistance to various pests, as well as annual additional costs for its maintenance, especially the facade of the house. In addition, if special impregnations (antiseptics, hydrophobic agents) are used for wood treatment, the tree becomes not entirely environmentally friendly, for many people these solutions can cause allergic reactions.
A country cottage built of brick, unlike a wooden one, has a number of undeniable advantages.
The first benefit is durability. A brick country house is much superior to a wooden one in terms of durability. So, a house built in compliance with construction technology and using high-quality bricks can stand without the need for major repairs for about 70 years.
Brick country houses are more able to withstand the destructive effects of various atmospheric factors: low temperatures, rain, snow, wind. In addition, brick houses are practically not subject to biological destruction, which cannot be said about wooden ones.
Owners of wooden houses from year to year have to spend extra money and paint and varnish wood. Stone buildings do not need annual renewal.
It is also important that the thermal insulation characteristics of brick houses are higher than those of wooden ones. A brick house is able to retain heat better, which will allow you to further save on heating when living in a house in the winter.
Currently, modern brick and other concrete building materials will allow you to bring to life a large number of bright architectural ideas in terms of number of floors, level of design complexity, style, and decoration. Using bricks for exterior cladding of the facade, you can get not only reliable and durable walls, but also originality and originality in the style of their decoration. The decoration of the walls of a brick house can be made of both artificial materials and natural stone. Facing tiles and bricks of various colors and textures of the front surface are widely represented on sale.
Not the last advantage of stone cottages over wooden ones is fire safety and high fire resistance. In this regard, brick is one of the safest non-combustible building materials, capable of not collapsing and maintaining its characteristics (strength, bearing capacity) even with prolonged exposure to high temperatures. After a fire, a wooden house has to be rebuilt, as they say, from scratch.
Thanks to its excellent performance characteristics, a brick house has become the embodiment of stability, reliability, solidity and confidence in the future. Well-built brick houses can live for several generations. Of course, a brick house in construction is more expensive than a wooden one, but at the same time you get a number of indisputable advantages.