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The problem with the airtighness and the wood stove is that they usually suck in lots of air from the room they are in and blow it out of the chimney. In an old hose this is no problem because there are lots of leaks where fresh air from outside can replace the "missing" air. In a modern air-tight house the air is sucked out but not replaced so the fire won't burn properly and also the oxygen levels in the house will become quite low inside the house. The biggest danger however is under-pressure. If too much air get's sucked out of the house there is a pressure-vacuum that can lead to the chimney sucking exhaust air back in instead of blowing it out. Then you have poisonous fumes in the lounge...and I think nobody wants that.
About the construction time...it depends very much on what you are building. In the area where our house will (hopefully soon) stand there are quite a few bungalow type houses under constrcution .They went from nonexisten to just-about-done in the course of a few weeks. However, a two-storey house with cellar and a lot of extras built in takes a fair bit longer to build. Also, there are differences in construction methods. You can build a brick house (like we are doing) where they actually have to pull it up brick by brick or you can build with pre-fabricated parts, mainly made from wood. A really fast company can have a house made from prefabricated bits all don in 2 weeks...electricity and all.
In our case only the cellar is going to be built from prefabricated parts...it has to be watertight so we'll have sandwich walls filled with water-tight concrete. It's going to be interesting to watch that. The rest of the house is bricks.
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