75 Stone street
House materials
Click on the circle areas to find out more
Foundations
When a new building is constructed, its foundations are laid first to stop it sinking. The foundations in a modern house like 75 Stone Street, Quarryville are made of concrete, which is a mixture of aggregate (mostly limestone), cement and water.
Piles
Tall, heavy skyscrapers need extra-strong foundations. They are supported by concrete or steel rods, called piles, sunk up to 25 metres into the ground.
Bricks
Bricks are made mostly from clay, although some are made from concrete. Clay is a type of sedimentary material. Soft clay can easily be pressed into any shape and then fired (heated) to become hard.
Different clays make different coloured bricks because they have slightly different compositions.
The average house is built with 10,000 bricks, weighing about 19.3 tonnes in total. To make one tonne of clay bricks, 1.5 tonnes of clay are required. That adds up to nearly 29 tonnes of clay per house. That takes a lot of excavating from quarries!
Walls
Inside walls are normally made of concrete blocks. The surface of these walls is covered with plaster, which is made by powdering and heating a mineral called gypsum.
Granite can be used for the base of the walls because it’s very tough. It is formed from melted rocks deep in the Earth’s crust.
Mortar, which is a mixture of sand, lime and cement is used to hold bricks together to form walls. The cement itself is made from heating a mixture of powdered limestone and clay.
Columns and steps
The columns and steps of entrances are often made with creamy white limestone that’s packed with fossil shells. The shells tell us that the rock formed at the bottom of coastlines and estuaries.
Windows
Even the glass in the windows is made from rock. It’s made from melting together sand, limestone and salt. All of these have to be very pure if the glass is to be clear.
Roof, roof tiles and pipes
On most modern houses, the roof tiles are made of clay. Clay also has other surprising uses: pipes, electrical insulators, ceramic kitchen tiles and washbasins are made from clay.
The only material in most modern houses that doesn’t come from a quarry is timber, which is often used for the floors and sometimes for the roof.