THE VANCOUVER BRIDE 21

The economies that you can effect in selecting materials must thus start
out at the very beginning of home building, for you must make the selections
before the building operation starts. Your problem comes down to this:
How can one get sound material without extravagance—for just as it is
easy to select materials that are too poor; in the same way is is easy to select
Juxurious kinds without achieving any real advance in durability or comfort.

If you take an oak timber and cut it straight in toward the centre of the
tree. you obtain a facing which is of peculiar beauty. This is known as the
quarter sawed face.

A piece of lumber cut this way has the double virtue of fine appearance
and of great strength, but if we were to require the use of quarter sawed
stock alone for framing joists and studs, we would increase the cost of the
house beyond all reason, without making it sufficiently stronger to justify
the extra expense.

To carry this idea into a little more practical application, it is easy to
see that the use of quarter sawed oak or of any other material of like fine-
ness for interior finishing only would entail an extra expense and, therefore,
a reduction in first economies which would not be reasonable from the point
of view of one who must build at the lowest possible first cost consistent with
good construction.

The specifications for the building of a home are full of possibilities for
savings or extravagances. You may insist on double strength or “A” quality
window glass, where single strength or “B” quality would do exactly as well.
You had better have sound joists under your common oak floors, than weak,
knotty sagging beams with the clearest and best oak that you can get for
the finish floor. ,

The use of good materials in home building may, then, have this parti-
cular sense—that money may be wasted through the use of good materials
that are extravagantly fine. Let no one deduce from this that the use of poor
materials is recommended. For the home-builder nothing could be more
wasteful. There is no more certain way of losing your hard earned savings
ae to invest them in materials that are not up to standard strength and
quality.

We have all seen houses grown old before their time—wooden houses
out of plumb, boards pulled away from their nailings, shingles curled, floors
sagging; brick houses with the mortar washed out of joints, bricks soft and
badly stained; stucco houses cracked and the lath exposed to rusting and fine
appearance ruined. These are the almost certain results of poor materials.

-_ Bad workmanship with poor construction is the-twin evil with bad ma-
terials. Poor building from any cause—materials, workmanship or methods
—always shows up in the life of the building. The man who built that dilapi-
dated house we see, saved perhaps, when he built it, 5 or 6 per cent. of the
proper total cost of the house by the use of inferior materials. At the end of
a ten-year period, his house is in so bad a state of repair that it is worth, as
it stands, perhaps only half of what was originally put into it. There has
been depreciation of 50 per cent. during this period, which is 5 per cent. per
year—nearly three times too much.