In 1925, only half of homes in the US had electric lighting. None had air conditioning. Many would have had only steam boilers (which can function without electric pumps) fired by hand-shoveled coal. Most would have had no insulation. In 1940, half of homes had no indoor flush toilets and no hot running water.

If you built a house today without electricity, with only cold water service, and an outhouse, I think you’d save a fair bit on skilled trades (and be pretty damn unhappy when you visited a neighbor and saw their utilities).

>In 1925, only half of homes in the US had electric lighting. None had air conditioning. Many would have had only steam boilers (which can function without electric pumps) fired by hand-shoveled coal. Most would have had no insulation. In 1940, half of homes had no indoor flush toilets and no hot running water.

This is true but can be a little bit misleading.

You would expect new homes built in 1925 or 1940 to have many more of these amenities than the average. (you can see the flush toilet in the Sears 1914 home).

For context, The average home in the US today was built ~45 years ago.

"In 1925, only half of homes in the US had electric lighting."

Surely if our goal was to compare prices of TVs over the past 20 years, and if we found that prices of TVs haven't changed, you cannot then claim 'well, old TVs were 720p and modern TVs are 4K, so actually the price of TVs dropped 4 times!'

Today we have all kinds of things that increase productivity: electric power tools, prebuilt parts, laser levels and measuring tools, CAD software, flooring that interlocks, expanding foam that's easilly applied from a spray can, drywall and dozens of things I never even heard of.

There's a lot of ways that the standards have changed, it's not just one dimension.

Complexity and feature set are probably the biggest. New construction single-family homes today are more likely to be customized, not kits, have way more features and way better mechanicals. That 1914 house had no kitchen appliances, no laundry appliances, no driveway, no garage, no insulation, no central HVAC, etc.

No kidding. Brick foundation, exterior plumbing, knob and tube wiring with 1 electrical outlet and 1 ceiling light bulb per room, zero insulation, single pane glass windows, dirt driveway... all features of my "charming, historically accurate" previous residence.

As an owner of 90+ year old home. Yes. It's quite dramatic how underbuilt old homes are. 2x4 joists spanning 10+ feet was commonplace. Foundations were cinderblocks holding up whole timbers. Insulation wasn't even a thing!