steel vs wood

We liked the idea of a steel frame however DH worked in housing industry and said there are lots of issues with heat and noise transfer + it is difficult to get approval to extend (even pergola or roof mounted aircon) because the house has been engineered within small tolerances.

Other ppl swear by it .

We are going steel framed, originally cause thats what the builder we want to do our place does as standard but now after some research we actually prefer that as an option...

We heard the stories about it being noisy, problems with expansion during the day, attracting lightening, difficulties in adding extensions etc, bad TV reception, difficulties in doing plumbing and wiring (because you have to drill through steel rather than timber) etc but after extensive research we have found that most of these issues are easily addressed (or are in fact some urban legends - eg it being more of a lightening rod)....

I think its a matter of doing your research and choosing whats best for you -

For us its the ease of knowing that the house will be protected from termites (and not need the use of ongoing termite poisons around the house) - we may still install some mesh system to protect the skirting boards and architraves etc but we've yet to decide if we'll do that..... its also about having a good consistent product (the beams are straight so you have less problems with curves in walls or other parts of the frames)

Any noise issue is easily dealt with by installing appropriate insulation (plus we currently live in a steel framed house and I can say it is no noiser than a timber framed one) - and the CSIRO did a study which concluded that a steel framed house was no noiser than a house built with another type of frame ...

The company we are building with have inserts build into the steel frame to enable plumbing and wiring to move through the steel frames so it is easy for tradies to install what they need to do ..... they also assure us (and we have spoken to council about this) that due to the type of framing that they use it is no more difficult to get approval for extensions through council than for a timber framed house ....

I'm pretty happy about building a steel framed house... the price is very good and we get colourbond roofing as standard (no additional cost) which I'm rather partial to ......

Fiona