We want to know what questions kids are interested in. We answer one question each week. This question comes from 4-year-old Nina.
These mid-terrace homes can weigh nearly 300 tons. Photo: Frank Lumpenhorst/dpa
Weighing a house is not easy because it requires a huge scale. Since I don’t have a scale, I’m going to do what journalists always do: guess, calculate, and ask questions.
As it turns out, your house is a mid-terrace house with a floor area of about 11×6 meters, or 66 square meters. It has two floors, an attic with a sloping ceiling, and a basement. I assume your house is built with common materials such as reinforced concrete, brick, and drywall. The height of the basement is probably about 2.5 meters, so a tall person can stand in it. A reinforced concrete basement with an area of 66 square meters weighs about 60,000 kilograms, or 60 tons. That’s the equivalent of 10 full-grown elephants.
That is heavy, but the ceiling between the outer wall and the floor is also heavy. If it is made of bricks and reinforced concrete and is about 20cm thick, the entire outer wall will weigh 80 tons, and the ceiling will weigh about 95 tons. The tile roof, including the roof structure, weighs about 6 tons.
Now that the walls are gone, the room is a little lighter. With 50 square meters of drywall interior walls, you get a total of about 40 tons per floor. Now add it all up and you’ll see that your empty house weighs about 281 tons. That’s heavier than a blue whale and as heavy as a fully loaded large airplane! That’s a good thing. After all, you don’t want your house to blow away in a storm.
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But your home is not just made up of walls and ceilings, it also contains furniture and all sorts of things. Luckily, there are people who make a lot of money by knowing how much household stuff you own: insurance companies. According to their estimates, your home could contain about 8 tons of all the household stuff you own, including chairs, clothes, bathtubs, Christmas tree stands, toothbrushes, toys, and more. That’s a total weight of 289 tons for your home and household stuff.
Now I have to admit, dear Nina, this was the first time I calculated the weight of a house. So I asked my friend if it was true. He is a skilled building materials tester and knows a lot about the components that make up a house. He said, “So far, it sounds logical.” I hope you do too.
