“You can do a good job with frame construction and you can do a bad job with frame construction,” Hewes said. The quality of construction between frame and block houses is also a toss-up.īill Hewes, Orange County building director, said it’s almost impossible to say whether frame construction is better than block construction. “They wanted a house that they knew somebody couldn’t cut through.” “It had something to do with the crime problems they had where they used to live,” Holt said. An in-house Landstar study of buyer tastes showed that, for those buyers, block homes represented security, Holt said. “It all depends on what the buyer wants and what he’s used to,” Holt said.įor example, home buyers who move here from South Florida and Latin America show strong preference for block homes. With few exceptions, prices for concrete and frame houses of equal dimensions are usually the same, Holt said. Rowland Holt, vice president of construction for Landstar Homes, which has built about 5,000 block homes in the Buenaventura Lakes subdivision near Kissimmee and in the Meadow Woods development in south Orange County, said choosing between a block and a frame house is a matter of buyer preference. “Concrete never gets softer, it just gets harder,” Miller said. “In the wintertime, the ceiling is where you have your greatest heat loss.”Īnd notwithstanding the advances in treating lumber against rotting problems, concrete never rots, Miller said. “That’s where all the heat collects in the summertime,” Miller said. In the attic, block houses can be insulated equally as well as frame houses, Miller said. He said that although block houses have gotten a bad rap because their walls have lower R values than frame-constructed walls, the insulation of walls isn’t as important to heating and cooling as is the insulation of the ceiling. Miller, who was hired by Florida Concrete and Products Association two months ago specifically to promote block construction, said block houses stay cooler on summer mornings because it takes longer for them to heat up. However, advocates of block construction said that block offers several advantages over frame. Concrete block walls are wider than frame walls, and take up more room, Johnson said.
Johnson also said a frame house of equal exterior dimensions with a block house will have more interior space. Termite infestations have been reduced because many builders are treating the soil under a house with pesticides before it is built. Wood rot problems have been taken care of by pressure- treating wood at lumber factories. “You have many people who come down here, and frame is the only thing they know.” Johnson said many of the original problems with frame houses in Florida have been solved.
“Frame is the only way they build houses up north,” Johnson said. Quincy Johnson, a Boca Raton architect who has designed both block and frame houses for several major subdivision developers in Florida, said another factor in frame’s favor is that home buyers moving to Florida from the North are more familiar with frame. “If you want to get a curve in a wall or a special angle, you can do that with frame construction, but you can’t with block,” Harter said. A second reason many builders are going to frame homes is that they offer more flexibility in the finished look of a home.
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