Why does nobody talk about how much wood a standard house frame actually uses?

I was reading an old trade journal from the 90s and saw that a typical 2,000 square foot home in the Midwest uses around 16,000 board feet of lumber for the frame. That number blew my mind, it's way more than I ever pictured. It really makes you think about the scale of our material use. Has anyone else come across stats that changed how they view a common job?

2 comments

2 Comments

emery9653h ago

Honestly that is a lot of wood. But trees are a crop, they grow back. Seems like a normal part of building stuff to me.

hugo_cooper3h ago

I used to think exactly like @emery965 about trees just being a crop. Then I saw a report on old growth forests in the Pacific Northwest. A single one of those ancient trees can be over 800 years old and is home to hundreds of species that can't live in new tree farms. Cutting that down isn't like harvesting corn. It wipes out a whole ecosystem that won't come back for centuries, if ever. It made me see that not all wood is the same, and some of it really is a huge loss.