I had the chance to go and stay with a host family in the States recently – not quite an exchange visit but one where I had the opportunity to live in with a family rather than a hotel. It was really a great idea. You see and experience things that hotels simply cannot offer. One for starters was seeing up close how they build new houses in Texas. They have an massive amount of wood at their disposal and the A frame and all other framework is cut from this and they seem to have many sets of frames close up on which are attached the sandwich of fibreboards. We have a brick skin, inside which come the grey solid breeze blocks. Once inside these battlements come our interior walls of thick fibreboards. Load bearing walls are built of brick. They haven’t needed heavier buiding protection against tremendously cold winters or lots of wet weather – until this century. A house built like ours would be like a greenhouse apparently.