Wait…wait. Did he cut through the floor joists in order to inset the pipe?

This kills the tenant!

The text might be bait, but this seems like an awful lot of trouble for a joke. Someone probably did do this and someone took a picture to show it off.

Much better. Imagine you’re bending something. The maximum tension is going to be at the very bottom and the max compression is going to be at the very top (this is why steel I-beams are shaped the way the are - to put the most material in the areas doing the most work). If you can put the hole in the middle you’re not impacting the structural integrity of the joist too much. You’d still have to worry about shear forces so you’d not want the hole to be too close to either end. Look up “castellated beam” if you want to see some steel examples.

Assuming it's centered vertically and not too close to the ends, then the joists would still have essentially full strength. Because the top and bottom are seeing compression and tension, there's an area in the middle that's not so critical.

A lot. Most of the strength from a beam comes from the top and bottom, because these are the parts that have to stretch or compress most when the beam is bending. The middle part is contributing relatively little for strength.

That is why metal poles are often hollow, that saves a lot of material and weight without losing much strength.

Wait what? Wooden houses are great! With insulation, of course

I remember being a kid and watching a few films where people fall over and put holes in the walls; I was so confused. I didn’t understand how people could put holes in bricks using their arms and legs.

Instead of building out of wood they should come up with a material made from carbon extracted from the air through an organic process.

Wouldn't the world be better off if we used building materials that were carbon negative?

There's parts of the country where it doesn't regularly get cold enough for insulation to really matter.

That said, my house in the Chicago suburbs is over 140 years old and was definitely never insulated underneath. By the feel of the walls in the winter any insulation that was in there has probably all collapsed as well.

Wooden beams for the floors is even common in houses made of bricks though. I live in the Netherlands and brick houses that have been standing for hundreds of years have wooden floors and the foundation is even standing on wooden piles. Wood isn’t as shit of a building material as you think it is. There are even modern apartments in freezing Northern Europe that are made with cross laminated timber. https://www.dezeen.com/2015/09/23/puukuokka-oopeaa-tallest-wooden-apartment-block-finland-wins-finlandia-prize-for-architecture-2015/

The problem in American buildings isn’t that they are made of wood it’s that they do it cheaply. Stick framing is the most common way to build a house in the US. You can build a very solid house out of wood if you opt for timber framing. Like in Japan there are wooden temples that have been standing for more than a thousand years.

Remove pipe, replace the house, reinstall pipe.

My dad used to have a little old house where the previous owner cut a notch like this through the main beam to run a PVC pipe for the toilet. We bridged the gap with a strip of steel plate and then braced it with a foundation jack. That wouldn't work with so many beams cut though.

Just extra pieces of wood! So lazy to leave them there!