13 ms·

The wonder of modern drywall

154 points by jger15 8mo ago

elephanlemon 8mo ago
“You’re in luck if you’ve been hankering to have your wall connected to wifi.”
- grebc 8mo ago
  It’s so they can begin selling you a subscription to allow you to hang a picture.
enobrev 8mo ago
I will never understand why we fill our walls with mechanical and electrical infrastructure and then wrap them in a paper and plaster, which then needs to be torn, broken, and repaired in order to maintain said infrastructure. Pipes will fail. Wires will fail. Ducts will fail. Maybe not in 5 years, but over the span of 20, they will. Why make them so frustratingly inaccessible?
- grebc 8mo ago
  Cheaper than building them behind concrete or brick.
  - esseph 8mo ago
    I think the question is: why are they behind anything to begin with? Conduit all the things and paint to match?
    - grebc 8mo ago
      Probably not legal.
      - Fwirt 8mo ago
        Generally things that are illegal are illegal because enough people have maimed or killed themselves with it in ways that are not “common sense”. For example, you can’t simply have electrical wire stapled to the bottom of the joists in the basement because people might try to hang clothes off of them.
        grebc 8mo ago
        You don’t need to explain that to me.
      - bombcar 8mo ago
        It's legal and done quite often in industrial installations - look around the next time the lights are up at your favorite restaurant, for example. It is more expensive, by more than you'd think, and so it's rarely done. It also allows all of the trades save the drywaller/painter to be rough and tumble with what they're doing; it doesn't have to look nice behind the walls.
    - accrual 8mo ago
      This is essentially what some industrial-style lofts do.
    - globular-toast 8mo ago
      People prefer how it looks and it's also more convenient to have a square room and no irregular protrusions stopping you pushing furniture up against the wall. In the UK it used to be common for pipework to be exposed and painted. Electrical conduit is pretty common in "industrial" places like garages but the number of sockets people expect now would mean you'd barely have a flat wall anywhere. The current preference is definitely for clean looking, square rooms. When pipes don't fit in the walls themselves, like soil pipes or around boilers, they are boxed in or hidden away in a cupboard.
- mlyle 8mo ago
  What's the alternative, though? Removable panels will be more expensive, and troublesome in various ways. Drywall is not too bad to deal with. And 99% of the wall surface doesn't need to be opened for a -long- time.
  - enobrev 8mo ago
    I watched a video recently, which I can't find, where an architect set up a beautiful wooden baseboard around the entirety of their property, and that baseboard held all mechanicals and was perfectly clean and easy to get into as needed. Drywall is manageable and cheap, I agree. But it's more painful than it should be for something that _will_ require maintenance.
    - Fwirt 8mo ago
      This sounds great but violates all the building codes for a variety of reasons: eddy currents, risk of electrocution if there’s a short somewhere, noise in telecom cables, etc.
      - mlyle 8mo ago
        You can absolutely put NM cable, etc, under a cover. It's just more trouble than it is worth. You still need the required setbacks from the wall, etc, and .. there's reasons why bored holes very low on the wall (like for a baseboard cover) could be problematic. And for telecom / low voltage, you have a lot of freedom of how you do it.
    - nostrademons 8mo ago
      I've seen videos where people will put in removable drywall panels that can just be lifted out for access. There are a lot of downsides though. You lose airsealing, if you don't have an airtight building envelope on the outside of the drywall. You lose fire resistance. You often lose aesthetics, although I've seen this done extremely tastefully. You lose childproofing, and run the risk of a kid electrocuting themselves or destroying your plumbing or dropping stuff in the wall. You impose constraints on what can go on the walls and where your furniture can go. Given that drywall is pretty easy to cut and replace, most people figure it's just not worth the costs for something you do infrequently.
- dathanb82 8mo ago
  And do what? Leave the ducting, pipes, and electrical lines exposed for the one time in 20 years you need to do something with them? In addition to being much more attractive than exposed infrastructure, drywall and the insulation that gets put behind it help make your house much more energy efficient.
  - valleyer 8mo ago
    No -- use doors.
    - asdff 8mo ago
      So a bunch of doors everywhere you don't open for potentially 100 years?
- accrual 8mo ago
  I wouldn't call it easy, but it's conceptually simple to cut a square hole in some drywall to access behind it, and then pop the piece back in with screws, mud, and tape, then paint.
  - enobrev 8mo ago
    For sure. I've wired my old house with speakers in every ceiling, and cat-6 in every room. I've had a small pipe burst and a couple leaks behind a bathroom. I've patched quite a bit of drywall, and I'm about mediocre at it. But it seems so silly and unnecessary to me. Everything else in this world that requires maintenance comes with access panels and other means of easy access. In our living spaces, some of which should ideally last tens of years (mine is from the 1890s), we seal it all away.
    - asdff 8mo ago
      If you think the drywall access situation is bad, don't start working on your cars.
    - moduspol 8mo ago
      I'm with you. I can read a post like OP and appreciate that drywall is a lot better than what came before, but I find it difficult to understand how we haven't come up with something better. Something less heavy, easier to fix without expertise, doesn't require applying some surface pattern to hide imperfections when used on a ceiling. I guess something conceptually like a drop-ceiling (which has a "finished" look, but is very accessible for maintenance), except for walls. That's what we need.
      - turtlebits 8mo ago
        Because drywall is cheap, incredibly tolerant of movement and irregularities. It's also super easy to repair. It can also act as an air barrier for energy efficiency. A drop ceiling is terrible for that and is ugly AND expensive.
    - blincoln 8mo ago
- MarkMarine 8mo ago
  Drywall is trivial to remove and repair, I have no issue cutting walls with a circular saw or vibrating cutter to get access then patching it. I have seen another method for making walls that were accessible though, from a homesteader/ hand tool woodworker and carpenter. His walls were 24” thick with huge areas for piping and electrical and had 4x4’ removable wood panels. https://youtu.be/8fdm9R1Cbm0?si=9SRXgcdutos-hywc https://youtu.be/8fdm9R1Cbm0?si=9SRXgcdutos-hywc
  - alanbernstein 8mo ago
    It's the repainting that bothers me
  - kmoser 8mo ago
    I wouldn't call it trivial. First you have to determine where to cut it; if you cut the wrong area you have to cut again. All the steps in repairing it either take time, are messy, or require some skill, and the time adds up (e.g. waiting for the patch to dry before you can sand; waiting for the primer to dry before you can paint; etc.). And then you have to match the surrounding paint, which is all but impossible since even if you have the same color, the original will have likely faded over the years, making your newly applied coat a mismatch, so now you have to paint the entire wall (no fun when it's a big wall). And if you had wallpaper instead of paint, good luck to you unless you saved some extra scraps. All in all, an access panel would make the job much simpler.
    - asdff 8mo ago
      The thing is you might not need to access your electric or plumbing for like 100 years. You do get a panel where access is presumably on a more regular schedule: usually the shower hookups are accessible from a closet.
    - MarkMarine 8mo ago
      Ok, I glossed over color matching the wall patch. Fair. But there really aren’t many walls you need to open in a house. There is probably 2-3 wet walls, so unless you need to retrofit some ducting why are you opening a wall? Code says there are no hidden wire junctions, so you’ve just got continuous runs of romex that are secured before they terminate… what do you open a wall for? Most of the drywall repair is just physical damage to the drywall itself.
- epcoa 8mo ago
  Rarely do pipes, wires, or ducts just outright fail even in 50 years. Usual case for tearing out drywall is for voluntary renovations. Shit behind the wall just doesn't "fail" if it is left undisturbed or you were unlucky like those that got defective PEX or similar installed.
  - badc0ffee 8mo ago
    Maybe you're thinking of poly-B, not PEX.
    - rootusrootus 8mo ago
      About 15 years ago I installed a new kitchen faucet for my grandmother, whose kitchen had been renovated in the early/mid 90s. Right near the end of the time when PB was inexplicably popular. I have to say, I spent several hours cursing whoever decided to use PB, and in this particular case whoever decided that the pipes should connect directly to the faucet rather than terminate at a bog standard quarter turn valve. Lots and lots of cursing. As I recall, wasn't PB basically a single vendor, too? Finding PB-to-anything-else adapters at Home Depot was like going on a treasure hunt. Sizing is different, so you really need something actually built for PB. And probably end up with sharkbites. If I were shopping for a house right now and found it had been plumbed with PB, I'd just turn around and walk away.
    - epcoa 8mo ago
      No, Uponor AquaPEX.
  - AngryData 8mo ago
    Wires not really but copper and iron pipes and ducts can and do corrode away. Ive seen hvac ducts that were more hole than anything but nobody noticed under the floor or above the ceiling.
  - hedora 8mo ago
    Rodents love PEX. If we knew, we'd have used copper. It would have been cheaper in the long run. It just takes one rat.
- kevin_thibedeau 8mo ago
  The paper is a critical technological innovation. It shrinks upon drying, turning the sheet into a prestressed panel. Predecessor manufactured wall materials like Beaverboard are much flimsier because they lack a taught skin that enhances rigidity.
  - mrexroad 8mo ago
    it's pretty cool how the paper faces effectively provide all the strength by creating a torsion box w/ the gypsum in the middle.
- hedora 8mo ago
  If we ever build another house, it's going to be attic-free with exposed conduits + hvac ducts / pipes on the ceiling. Every electrical box is going to have a 2" conduit (embedded in the wall) running up to a conduit that runs on the ceiling (if there's a basement, then down to the basement ceiling). This would let us avoid stapling electrical lines + network cables to studs inside walls. Fixing shorts, adding circuits and upgrading network lines would be trivial. We'd have to buy what, 1000' of conduit? There's no way that's a sufficient fraction of the cost of a house.
  - enobrev 8mo ago
    In Chicago, code requires EMT for all electrical, which can be annoying for adding a new run, but at the very least it makes it less likely for rodents to chew through or other interference. After wiring my whole house with Ethernet and ceiling speakers, and now dealing with a couple leaky pipes and several problems from previous owners, I'm considering ways to make these things easily accessible/replaceable while keeping an eye toward aesthetics.
    - epcoa 8mo ago
      For nearly a decade, Chicago does allow MC cable in a number of circumstances, basically up to 25 feet branches where you don’t want to open up a wall.
donkeybeer 8mo ago
Ctrl F "brick". Nothing about bricks and concrete in all the history of wall surfaces.
- accrual 8mo ago
  Brick is mentioned near the top: > a method of constructing walls that has been a mainstay for at least 6,000 years, predating mud bricks To be fair the article is about drywall and its history, not the history of all walls in general.
  - donkeybeer 8mo ago
    I was thinking of fired brick and concrete, which solves much of his problems of drilling into walls.
aaronbrethorst 8mo ago
Picture rails are a kitschy and twee feature that few people today even know their purpose, but anyone who tells you that they’re just as good for hanging things on are committing perjury In my humble opinion, they are significantly better than pounding a nail into drywall. Of course, I also have an absurdly large collection of framed photographs and other art, all of varying sizes, and I love swapping frames around throughout my home. Having picture rails throughout my house means I don't have to keep pounding holes in the wall every time I replace that 20x20" photograph of my toddler shot in a square aspect ratio with a 16x20 shot on my 4x5, or whatever.
- littlestymaar 8mo ago
  And the author completely misses the point thinking it's somehow mandatory in plaster walls, when it's just a convenience thing that avoids making holes in the plaster…
  - rootusrootus 8mo ago
    I do appreciate why people want to avoid that, plaster does crumble pretty easily. Combined with 100+ year old lath that is as hard as iron, it can be a mild pain in the ass to hang a picture without doing more damage to the plaster than you want.
- xnx 8mo ago
  Do picture rails work for gallery walls (clusters of frames)?
  - aaronbrethorst 8mo ago
    I think so. https://www.stasgroup.com/en https://www.stasgroup.com/en
  - joeblubaugh 8mo ago
    Yes - you can hang multiple hooks per line. You can use more lines. I was at the Rijksmuseum recently and they use a wire system like this for all manner of configurations
mcbishop 8mo ago
I really like this guy's drywall-install how-to videos: https://www.youtube.com/@vancouvercarpenter https://www.youtube.com/@vancouvercarpenter
- mrexroad 8mo ago
  pretty sure it's an established rule now that drywall cannot be discussed w/o linking to vancouver carpenter. but, yeah, his videos are great. i've done more than my share of everything from sound abatement channels/glues/etc, hanging rock on vaulted ceilings, to level 5 finishes, but I still like to flip though his videos every now and then and pick up logistical / speed tips.
PaulDavisThe1st 8mo ago
Interesting to me that no mention of the use of drywall (in various forms) to act as a substrate for actual plaster. This seems common in the UK from what I understand from my family back there, and it is also common in the USA in high end residential construction. It is particular common in Santa Fe where I live now (for high end anyway) because the so-called "diamond plaster" look & feel is very popular. So, you still build with stick frames (or in a few cases, cinder block), cover that with drywall/sheetrock, then plaster it.
- globular-toast 8mo ago
  It is indeed how it's done in the UK. It's a bit of a cliché for British people to complain about American houses, but it's not that we don't have stud walls ourselves, it's just that we don't just go and paint directly on top of plasterboard. Both walls and ceilings are skimmed, with either plaster or shudder Artex. We also have dot and dab walls which are built from block, have a layer of plasterboard glued, leaving a ~6mm cavity, then skimmed with plaster.
  - rootusrootus 8mo ago
    Probably 99% of all drywall in the US is not painted directly, either. It is textured [0]. I'll go out on a limb and say that a substantial majority these days are orange peel texture on the walls and knockdown on the ceiling, made primarily with drywall mud (Artex seems to be essentially the same thing). I'm not sure I would want a plaster skim in any case. I grew up in a house built in 1914 that had lath & plaster, and I've cursed the brittle plaster many times. We even had actual picture rails but my mom never liked to use them to actually hang pictures, amusingly enough. [0] To be brutally honest, the texturing isn't for any particular reason aside from how well it hides minor imperfections. Having someone skim coat the walls and ceiling with a perfectly smooth finish is definitely a thing, but it's a good bit more labor intensive.
    - nkurz 8mo ago
      > Probably 99% of all drywall in the US is not painted directly, either. I'm not sure about the exact numbers, but I'm pretty certain this is a vast overestimate. I've painted a more than average number of interior walls in the US (both personally and professionally) and except for a few that were wood, adobe, or lath and plaster, all the rest involved painting directly on drywall. Sometimes the base paint was applied with a thick nap roller to achieve a degree of texture, but I never textured one with something else before painting. All I can guess is that there are large regional or cultual differences here, and each of us is having a very localized experience.
MarkMarine 8mo ago
I think this misses the beauty of a plaster wall. Level 5 drywall has nothing on a skilled artisan with plaster, and yeah you can’t hang things through it but it also lasts hundreds of years. My walls are 120 years old and robust, the kids haven’t damaged them and they’ve more than held up.
- asdff 8mo ago
  You can hang things through it just as easy as drywall too. Light stuff just put it right into the lathe. Heavy stuff, with both types of walls you are going to want to anchor into a stud.
  - franktankbank 8mo ago
    How do you find yourself a lath? Try once if it doesn't hit then move up/down a 3/4 inch.
    - kevin_thibedeau 8mo ago
      You can see it on a thermal camera with a high resolution sensor from China (not the ITAR limited US tech).
      - amluto 8mo ago
        Got a link? This sounds handy.
        kevin_thibedeau 8mo ago
        Thermal Master P3: 25fps, 256x192, manual focus
        blincoln 8mo ago
        Looks like it's improved even further - I'm seeing that model listed with 512x384 resolution, and it's $300 on Amazon. Pretty incredible! I felt like I was getting an amazing deal when I paid about $1000 15 years ago for a FLIR E4 that I could flash into an E8. I might finally retire that in favour of one of these.
fractallyte 8mo ago
There are reasons not to like gypsum drywall: > Some buildings standing today still have wattle-and-daub panels from 700 years ago. Will any drywalled building survive even a tenth of this time? > The plaster mixture used then was a homegrown concoction, with recipes matching the climate needs and vernacular material availability. The wonder of wattle-and-daub (clay) and plaster-and-lath (lime) is that the materials are breathable, move with the structure, and can even self-repair small cracks. I don't know of any old house that suffers from black mold... My last big gripe with gypsum drywall is disposal. Demolish a property with clay or lime walls, and they'll naturally degrade into the environment. Drywall needs proper disposal: "Do not burn: Drywall releases toxic fumes. Do not bury: It can create dangerous hydrogen sulfide gas in landfill." Does anyone want to live with that?
- kogasa240p 8mo ago
  >Do not bury: It can create dangerous hydrogen sulfide gas in landfill." Wonder if in the future there will be incentives for proper disposal since you can extract hydrogen from it, other than that I agree with you.
- rootusrootus 8mo ago
  > I don't know of any old house that suffers from black mold... For much the same reason they don't suffer from low heating bills, either.
- kbelder 8mo ago
  I was just reading how it's common to pulverize gypsum drywall to mix into dense clay soils to loosen it up.
asdff 8mo ago
> It’s impossible to mount even lightweight items such as picture frames onto the wall, because even the tiniest hole from nails or the like would crumble and erode into dust. The trick for this is to just find the stud. Same thing you'd have to do in drywall. For light stuff like photos, you can get away with putting a nail right into the lathe without having to find a stud. If you miss the lathe (you can tell) just move the nail up a half inch.
- aidos 8mo ago
  Ha! If I even look at my lath and plaster walls the wrong way a little bit crumbles away.
  - asdff 8mo ago
    The trick is to have 100 years of landlord special paint holding it together
    - throw_away92r 8mo ago
      And with the old lead paint lowering your mental capacity as the years go by, you care even less about small inconstencies
      - asdff 8mo ago
        Safely contained behind several tenants worth of turnover or so I'm told. Walls are skip trowelled so inconsistency is just how they are.
    - franktankbank 8mo ago
      Wallpaper can be semi structural.
- kevin_thibedeau 8mo ago
  You really need to predrill through the lath. Old lath is much harder than freshly milled wood. If you hit anywhere off the stud it can cause the lath to flex and break the backside keying off. This leads to delamination with enough accumulated damage.
jf___ 8mo ago
A huge share of the gypsum used in drywall is *synthetic gypsum* — a byproduct of flue-gas desulfurization (FGD) at coal-fired power plants. When SO₂ is scrubbed from exhaust using limestone, the reaction produces calcium sulfate dihydrate, chemically identical to mined gypsum. In the US, FGD gypsum has accounted for roughly half of all gypsum consumed by the wallboard industry at its peak. The "cheap, uniform, and free of defects" story is partly a story about coal. The drywall industry scaled on the back of an abundant, nearly free waste stream from the energy sector. It's a classic example of industrial symbiosis — one industry's pollution abatement becomes another's feedstock. And it cuts the other way now: as coal plants shut down across Europe and North America, synthetic gypsum supply is shrinking. The drywall industry is facing a real raw material squeeze, with manufacturers having to shift back toward mined gypsum or find alternative sources. There's ongoing work on using phosphogypsum (from fertilizer production) but that comes with its own radioactivity concerns. For someone in your position this is particularly relevant — the "wonder" of drywall is entangled with the fossil fuel economy in a way that makes earth-based construction methods look increasingly attractive as that supply chain unwinds.
- xnx 8mo ago
  Fascinating. I wonder if supply constraints will make drywall recycling profitable.
  - PlunderBunny 8mo ago
    I don’t know about other countries, but in New Zealand there’s already recycling of leftover bits of drywall (we call it ‘gib board’ after a brand name). All the big building companies will accept leftover bits of gib board, but small bits can be thrown directly in your garden beds to help break up clay. The gypsum used in New Zealand is mined locally.
    - teruakohatu 8mo ago
      I was just wondering where our gypsum came from, I always assumed it was mined. Thank you for the information.
m0llusk 8mo ago
some interesting new failure modes also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_drywall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_drywall
- mrexroad 8mo ago
  new? that was literally two decades ago.
ghtbircshotbe 8mo ago
1. Is plaster and lath gypsum based? In my experience plaster is basically identical to stucco, which is basically just mortar with increasingly fine sand. It is very hard and completely unlike drywall. 2) Why emphasize asbestos when talking about plaster? My understanding is you likely have more to worry about if you have a house from say the 40s-70s, which almost universally have some sort of drywall product.
- evnp 8mo ago
  We had our circa-1915 house checked for asbestos before lifting it. The inspector laughed after taking a chip out of the plaster because you could clearly see horse hair protruding from every side of the chip. This is apparently unlikely to overlap with asbestos, though it comes instead with a minor (?) anthrax risk. I'll take that over the dust from drywall sanding every time though.
- jccooper 8mo ago
  "Plaster" can be lime, gypsum, or cement, in rough order of historical adoption. Sometimes you even use different types on the same wall; cement rough coat and lime or gypsum top coat, for example.
KevinMS 8mo ago
> Because drywall is a dense and uniform mixture, hanging anything off the wall (from pictures to heavier items like shelves, TVs, or even cabinetry) is a trivial exercise, either a simple nail for a small frame, plaster anchors for medium loads, or toggle bolts for the real heavy hitters. yikes
- andwur 8mo ago
  That's inaccurate for standard thickness drywall sheet, which is usually a 20kg maximum parallel load (e.g. vertical for a wall) regardless of fixing method. Orthogonal load is even less. You might be able to attach a TV or cabinet but it would definitely not be safe, any additional weight or dynamic load would quite likely rip it off the wall with no warning. The recommended approach for anything with moderate weight or above is to anchor to the studs and never rely on the drywall itself for retention.
  - c0nsumer 8mo ago
    I suspect they are meaning because it's uniform you can easily find the studs through it and fasten things directly into them. An uneven wall material (plaster on lathe, or even plaster on drywall as we have in most of our house) can be quite a hassle to find the actual timbers/studs behind.
    - hedora 8mo ago
      Modern plaster has the same properties, and works well with stud finders. On a related note, if you can find a strong rare earth magnet, you can use it as a stud finder. It'll be attracted to the nails used to hold up the drywall / plaster backer boards. They sell purpose built ones with felt backs + built in bubble levels if you want to get fancy.
- quesera 8mo ago
  Very yikes. Also wrong: > By eschewing the lath lattices, buildings now have way more room in wall cavities for improved insulation and conduits The cavities are exactly the same size, plaster+lath, or drywall. Most residential construction won't use conduit anywhere, and commercial construction would never bury a conduit inside a wall, regardless of wall covering. These are weird things to get wrong.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
BadBadJellyBean 8mo ago
As a German I always found North American houses and their drywall and wood constructions incredibly odd. It always felt flimsy to me. From my experience we just started using drywall for some interior walls on some newly built homes. But throughout my life I was used to very massive walls. I recently saw some house building videos and it is somehow fascinating how different the building materials and methodologies are. North America obviously made it work, but still very odd to me.
- rootusrootus 8mo ago
  I think it's just what you get used to. Every method has ups and downs. And different regions are going to gravitate to different materials based on availability (for example, my Indian coworkers just cannot fathom why we would ever build houses from trees instead of reinforced concrete; doesn't it rot?!!). I don't think of the walls as especially flimsy, though. Built correctly, they are totally fine. Yes you can punch a hole in one if you are sufficiently motivated (and you better miss the stud...), but the only times I've ever punched any hole in drywall it was because the door stop was removed for whatever reason and a dumb teenager threw the door open with no regard for propriety. At least drywall is trivial to fix.
  - BadBadJellyBean 8mo ago
    > Yes you can punch a hole in one if you are sufficiently motivated This is what I meant with "flimsy". If I hit my wall my hand breaks. But as I said It seems to work. I am just used to the massive nature of our houses and I admit a part of me prefers it that way but I don't think it's the one true way.
  - lostlogin 8mo ago
    > why we would ever build houses from trees instead of reinforced concrete Earthquakes are a factor where we are, but also, if NZ can find a way to do something cheaper, we will always do it. Quality be damned.
    - usrnm 8mo ago
elendee 8mo ago
But the noise.. this has been a huge factor in my quality of life, having lived in both buildings. That issue trumps any advantage drywall has, and I spent about 10 years working with it as well. I think the market forces have simply dominated our natural, economically inefficient, home-dwelling instincts. I think this article means well, but it is written from the perspective of a landlord basically.
- nkrisc 8mo ago
  It's not really a drywall problem, but a drawback of the usual construction method. If you insulate the interior walls then noise isn't really a problem. Of course, most builders are not insulating or noise-proofing interior walls, so there you have it. I suppose with other building materials (bricks, concrete blocks) you get the solution "for free", so to speak.
  - ragall 8mo ago
    It's a problem because with stick frame and drywall, the builder has to take special effort to noise-isolate a house, which in effects ensures that not even 0.1% of housing has those properties. European regulations make for a much higher noise isolation by default.
    - hedora 8mo ago
      Noise barriers are incredibly cheap. They're a tiny fraction of the cost of putting up a drywall or plaster wall. Codes say how far apart the studs should be, so you just buy a roll of batting, and unroll it into the gap between the two walls. You have to cut it to fit, but that's not a big deal. It costs a few thousand bucks to do a whole house (during construction), even in areas with high labor costs. You can usually tack it on to the cost of insulating the exterior walls (which is basically the same process, but with a more expensive material).
      - ragall 8mo ago
        Nobody does it. Not even supposedly "luxury condos". And that's assuming it's really that cheap, which it isn't because to be effective, one needs to stop all sound transmission, not just for walls, but floors too, as well as interrupting the noise transmitted through the house's wooden structure. It's quite expensive.
porknubbins 8mo ago
If I ever get to build a house I’m using that high density drywall they have in hospitals everywhere but the ceiling. It doesn’t cost that much more compared to the labor and it would be enormously satisfying to know your walls can’t be easily dented or damaged.
hedora 8mo ago
Drywall is terrible vs. modern plaster. Modern plaster has backing boards that are similar to drywall, so you get most of the construction advantages (except for the labor intensive step of plastering), and can hand pictures / toggle bolts in the same way. Unlike plaster, drywall gets moldy + needs to be replaced after water damage. I think this is why films with old buildings set in Europe often show peeling paint / water damaged plaster, but people are still living in them, and it seems fine. In the US, buildings with that level of wear would be so moldy they'd need to be gutted to studs, at minimum. The article touches on mold resistant drywall, but I'll believe it when I see it. Also, apparently, it is much easier to create long-lasting patches for plaster than drywall.
- turtlebits 8mo ago
  It's more important to control moisture than buy moisture resistant materials. Drywall is great, its cheap and easy to repair. I would not want to live in any water damaged house without remediation due to the risk of mold.
- DANmode 8mo ago
  > In the US, buildings with that level of wear would be so moldy they'd need to be gutted to studs, at minimum. Middle America and the rust belt would like a word (and the word is: mycotoxins, lol).
ericwebb 8mo ago
I am also a fortunate owner of a 100+ year old home. Why is the lath and plaster so susceptible to cracking?! That is my nemesis. I haven’t tried to hang a TV though yet.
deadbabe 8mo ago
I stayed with a guy in France who had an old house with these picture rail things, and it was the first time I had come across something like that. I thought it was a very interesting solution for quickly rearranging artwork in your home if you love art but don't have enough wall space to display all your pieces so you might occasionally swap them.
turtlebits 8mo ago
Drywall is pretty amazing, but I don't agree with all the points in the article. It cheap to buy and cheap to install, easy to cut and installs fast. It's tolerant with imperfect walls and is surprisingly flexible. It can also be seamlessly repaired. It can also act as a primary air barrier. I do not like moisture resistant drywall, moisture control is more important as well as using proper materials in high humidity areas.
quokwok 8mo ago
Works In Progress have an odd antipathy to picture rails. Actually, picture rails are good. You don't have to fill any holes if you wish to move or remove a picture. To put up a picture rail, you can drill multiple holes laterally until you find a stud. The unused holes will be covered by the rail.
wellf 8mo ago
What about cement render? Seems like plaster board and plastering was only mentioned. I am sure plastering was common in 80s too but maybe misremembering. edit: seen other comments and that was/is "modern plastering" i.e. with backing boards.
ReptileMan 8mo ago
> The popular additive was asbestos. While today we all know about its intense toxicity Asbestos is not toxic. The mechanism by which it fucks up your lungs is completely different.
webnrrd2k 8mo ago
If you're interested in this kind of material, I'd recommend checking out Construction Physics by Brian Potter. https://www.construction-physics.com https://www.construction-physics.com
- kristianp 8mo ago
  Yes and it's often posted on hn: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=construction-physics.com https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=construction-physics....
aristofun 8mo ago
One thing I know for sure - this thing benefits mainly builders and renovators, not end users.
xnx 8mo ago
A lot of the criticism of drywall here is improved by double-upping.

154 points by jger15 8mo ago

elephanlemon 8mo ago

“You’re in luck if you’ve been hankering to have your wall connected to wifi.”

grebc 8mo ago
It’s so they can begin selling you a subscription to allow you to hang a picture.

enobrev 8mo ago

I will never understand why we fill our walls with mechanical and electrical infrastructure and then wrap them in a paper and plaster, which then needs to be torn, broken, and repaired in order to maintain said infrastructure. Pipes will fail. Wires will fail. Ducts will fail. Maybe not in 5 years, but over the span of 20, they will. Why make them so frustratingly inaccessible?

grebc 8mo ago
Cheaper than building them behind concrete or brick.
- esseph 8mo ago
  I think the question is: why are they behind anything to begin with? Conduit all the things and paint to match?
  - grebc 8mo ago
    Probably not legal.
    - Fwirt 8mo ago
      Generally things that are illegal are illegal because enough people have maimed or killed themselves with it in ways that are not “common sense”. For example, you can’t simply have electrical wire stapled to the bottom of the joists in the basement because people might try to hang clothes off of them.
      - grebc 8mo ago
        You don’t need to explain that to me.
    - bombcar 8mo ago
      It's legal and done quite often in industrial installations - look around the next time the lights are up at your favorite restaurant, for example. It is more expensive, by more than you'd think, and so it's rarely done. It also allows all of the trades save the drywaller/painter to be rough and tumble with what they're doing; it doesn't have to look nice behind the walls.
  - accrual 8mo ago
    This is essentially what some industrial-style lofts do.
  - globular-toast 8mo ago
    People prefer how it looks and it's also more convenient to have a square room and no irregular protrusions stopping you pushing furniture up against the wall. In the UK it used to be common for pipework to be exposed and painted. Electrical conduit is pretty common in "industrial" places like garages but the number of sockets people expect now would mean you'd barely have a flat wall anywhere. The current preference is definitely for clean looking, square rooms. When pipes don't fit in the walls themselves, like soil pipes or around boilers, they are boxed in or hidden away in a cupboard.
mlyle 8mo ago
What's the alternative, though? Removable panels will be more expensive, and troublesome in various ways. Drywall is not too bad to deal with. And 99% of the wall surface doesn't need to be opened for a -long- time.
- enobrev 8mo ago
  I watched a video recently, which I can't find, where an architect set up a beautiful wooden baseboard around the entirety of their property, and that baseboard held all mechanicals and was perfectly clean and easy to get into as needed. Drywall is manageable and cheap, I agree. But it's more painful than it should be for something that _will_ require maintenance.
  - Fwirt 8mo ago
    This sounds great but violates all the building codes for a variety of reasons: eddy currents, risk of electrocution if there’s a short somewhere, noise in telecom cables, etc.
    - mlyle 8mo ago
      You can absolutely put NM cable, etc, under a cover. It's just more trouble than it is worth. You still need the required setbacks from the wall, etc, and .. there's reasons why bored holes very low on the wall (like for a baseboard cover) could be problematic. And for telecom / low voltage, you have a lot of freedom of how you do it.
  - nostrademons 8mo ago
    I've seen videos where people will put in removable drywall panels that can just be lifted out for access. There are a lot of downsides though. You lose airsealing, if you don't have an airtight building envelope on the outside of the drywall. You lose fire resistance. You often lose aesthetics, although I've seen this done extremely tastefully. You lose childproofing, and run the risk of a kid electrocuting themselves or destroying your plumbing or dropping stuff in the wall. You impose constraints on what can go on the walls and where your furniture can go. Given that drywall is pretty easy to cut and replace, most people figure it's just not worth the costs for something you do infrequently.
dathanb82 8mo ago
And do what? Leave the ducting, pipes, and electrical lines exposed for the one time in 20 years you need to do something with them? In addition to being much more attractive than exposed infrastructure, drywall and the insulation that gets put behind it help make your house much more energy efficient.
- valleyer 8mo ago
  No -- use doors.
  - asdff 8mo ago
    So a bunch of doors everywhere you don't open for potentially 100 years?
accrual 8mo ago
I wouldn't call it easy, but it's conceptually simple to cut a square hole in some drywall to access behind it, and then pop the piece back in with screws, mud, and tape, then paint.
- enobrev 8mo ago
  For sure. I've wired my old house with speakers in every ceiling, and cat-6 in every room. I've had a small pipe burst and a couple leaks behind a bathroom. I've patched quite a bit of drywall, and I'm about mediocre at it. But it seems so silly and unnecessary to me. Everything else in this world that requires maintenance comes with access panels and other means of easy access. In our living spaces, some of which should ideally last tens of years (mine is from the 1890s), we seal it all away.
  - asdff 8mo ago
    If you think the drywall access situation is bad, don't start working on your cars.
  - moduspol 8mo ago
    I'm with you. I can read a post like OP and appreciate that drywall is a lot better than what came before, but I find it difficult to understand how we haven't come up with something better. Something less heavy, easier to fix without expertise, doesn't require applying some surface pattern to hide imperfections when used on a ceiling. I guess something conceptually like a drop-ceiling (which has a "finished" look, but is very accessible for maintenance), except for walls. That's what we need.
    - turtlebits 8mo ago
      Because drywall is cheap, incredibly tolerant of movement and irregularities. It's also super easy to repair. It can also act as an air barrier for energy efficiency. A drop ceiling is terrible for that and is ugly AND expensive.
  - blincoln 8mo ago
MarkMarine 8mo ago
Drywall is trivial to remove and repair, I have no issue cutting walls with a circular saw or vibrating cutter to get access then patching it. I have seen another method for making walls that were accessible though, from a homesteader/ hand tool woodworker and carpenter. His walls were 24” thick with huge areas for piping and electrical and had 4x4’ removable wood panels. https://youtu.be/8fdm9R1Cbm0?si=9SRXgcdutos-hywc https://youtu.be/8fdm9R1Cbm0?si=9SRXgcdutos-hywc
- alanbernstein 8mo ago
  It's the repainting that bothers me
- kmoser 8mo ago
  I wouldn't call it trivial. First you have to determine where to cut it; if you cut the wrong area you have to cut again. All the steps in repairing it either take time, are messy, or require some skill, and the time adds up (e.g. waiting for the patch to dry before you can sand; waiting for the primer to dry before you can paint; etc.). And then you have to match the surrounding paint, which is all but impossible since even if you have the same color, the original will have likely faded over the years, making your newly applied coat a mismatch, so now you have to paint the entire wall (no fun when it's a big wall). And if you had wallpaper instead of paint, good luck to you unless you saved some extra scraps. All in all, an access panel would make the job much simpler.
  - asdff 8mo ago
    The thing is you might not need to access your electric or plumbing for like 100 years. You do get a panel where access is presumably on a more regular schedule: usually the shower hookups are accessible from a closet.
  - MarkMarine 8mo ago
    Ok, I glossed over color matching the wall patch. Fair. But there really aren’t many walls you need to open in a house. There is probably 2-3 wet walls, so unless you need to retrofit some ducting why are you opening a wall? Code says there are no hidden wire junctions, so you’ve just got continuous runs of romex that are secured before they terminate… what do you open a wall for? Most of the drywall repair is just physical damage to the drywall itself.
epcoa 8mo ago
Rarely do pipes, wires, or ducts just outright fail even in 50 years. Usual case for tearing out drywall is for voluntary renovations. Shit behind the wall just doesn't "fail" if it is left undisturbed or you were unlucky like those that got defective PEX or similar installed.
- badc0ffee 8mo ago
  Maybe you're thinking of poly-B, not PEX.
  - rootusrootus 8mo ago
    About 15 years ago I installed a new kitchen faucet for my grandmother, whose kitchen had been renovated in the early/mid 90s. Right near the end of the time when PB was inexplicably popular. I have to say, I spent several hours cursing whoever decided to use PB, and in this particular case whoever decided that the pipes should connect directly to the faucet rather than terminate at a bog standard quarter turn valve. Lots and lots of cursing. As I recall, wasn't PB basically a single vendor, too? Finding PB-to-anything-else adapters at Home Depot was like going on a treasure hunt. Sizing is different, so you really need something actually built for PB. And probably end up with sharkbites. If I were shopping for a house right now and found it had been plumbed with PB, I'd just turn around and walk away.
  - epcoa 8mo ago
    No, Uponor AquaPEX.
- AngryData 8mo ago
  Wires not really but copper and iron pipes and ducts can and do corrode away. Ive seen hvac ducts that were more hole than anything but nobody noticed under the floor or above the ceiling.
- hedora 8mo ago
  Rodents love PEX. If we knew, we'd have used copper. It would have been cheaper in the long run. It just takes one rat.
kevin_thibedeau 8mo ago
The paper is a critical technological innovation. It shrinks upon drying, turning the sheet into a prestressed panel. Predecessor manufactured wall materials like Beaverboard are much flimsier because they lack a taught skin that enhances rigidity.
- mrexroad 8mo ago
  it's pretty cool how the paper faces effectively provide all the strength by creating a torsion box w/ the gypsum in the middle.
hedora 8mo ago
If we ever build another house, it's going to be attic-free with exposed conduits + hvac ducts / pipes on the ceiling. Every electrical box is going to have a 2" conduit (embedded in the wall) running up to a conduit that runs on the ceiling (if there's a basement, then down to the basement ceiling). This would let us avoid stapling electrical lines + network cables to studs inside walls. Fixing shorts, adding circuits and upgrading network lines would be trivial. We'd have to buy what, 1000' of conduit? There's no way that's a sufficient fraction of the cost of a house.
- enobrev 8mo ago
  In Chicago, code requires EMT for all electrical, which can be annoying for adding a new run, but at the very least it makes it less likely for rodents to chew through or other interference. After wiring my whole house with Ethernet and ceiling speakers, and now dealing with a couple leaky pipes and several problems from previous owners, I'm considering ways to make these things easily accessible/replaceable while keeping an eye toward aesthetics.
  - epcoa 8mo ago
    For nearly a decade, Chicago does allow MC cable in a number of circumstances, basically up to 25 feet branches where you don’t want to open up a wall.

donkeybeer 8mo ago

Ctrl F "brick". Nothing about bricks and concrete in all the history of wall surfaces.

accrual 8mo ago
Brick is mentioned near the top: > a method of constructing walls that has been a mainstay for at least 6,000 years, predating mud bricks To be fair the article is about drywall and its history, not the history of all walls in general.
- donkeybeer 8mo ago
  I was thinking of fired brick and concrete, which solves much of his problems of drilling into walls.

aaronbrethorst 8mo ago

Picture rails are a kitschy and twee feature that few people today even know their purpose, but anyone who tells you that they’re just as good for hanging things on are committing perjury In my humble opinion, they are significantly better than pounding a nail into drywall. Of course, I also have an absurdly large collection of framed photographs and other art, all of varying sizes, and I love swapping frames around throughout my home. Having picture rails throughout my house means I don't have to keep pounding holes in the wall every time I replace that 20x20" photograph of my toddler shot in a square aspect ratio with a 16x20 shot on my 4x5, or whatever.

littlestymaar 8mo ago
And the author completely misses the point thinking it's somehow mandatory in plaster walls, when it's just a convenience thing that avoids making holes in the plaster…
- rootusrootus 8mo ago
  I do appreciate why people want to avoid that, plaster does crumble pretty easily. Combined with 100+ year old lath that is as hard as iron, it can be a mild pain in the ass to hang a picture without doing more damage to the plaster than you want.
xnx 8mo ago
Do picture rails work for gallery walls (clusters of frames)?
- aaronbrethorst 8mo ago
  I think so. https://www.stasgroup.com/en https://www.stasgroup.com/en
- joeblubaugh 8mo ago
  Yes - you can hang multiple hooks per line. You can use more lines. I was at the Rijksmuseum recently and they use a wire system like this for all manner of configurations

mcbishop 8mo ago

I really like this guy's drywall-install how-to videos: https://www.youtube.com/@vancouvercarpenter https://www.youtube.com/@vancouvercarpenter

mrexroad 8mo ago
pretty sure it's an established rule now that drywall cannot be discussed w/o linking to vancouver carpenter. but, yeah, his videos are great. i've done more than my share of everything from sound abatement channels/glues/etc, hanging rock on vaulted ceilings, to level 5 finishes, but I still like to flip though his videos every now and then and pick up logistical / speed tips.

PaulDavisThe1st 8mo ago

Interesting to me that no mention of the use of drywall (in various forms) to act as a substrate for actual plaster. This seems common in the UK from what I understand from my family back there, and it is also common in the USA in high end residential construction. It is particular common in Santa Fe where I live now (for high end anyway) because the so-called "diamond plaster" look & feel is very popular. So, you still build with stick frames (or in a few cases, cinder block), cover that with drywall/sheetrock, then plaster it.

globular-toast 8mo ago
It is indeed how it's done in the UK. It's a bit of a cliché for British people to complain about American houses, but it's not that we don't have stud walls ourselves, it's just that we don't just go and paint directly on top of plasterboard. Both walls and ceilings are skimmed, with either plaster or shudder Artex. We also have dot and dab walls which are built from block, have a layer of plasterboard glued, leaving a ~6mm cavity, then skimmed with plaster.
- rootusrootus 8mo ago
  Probably 99% of all drywall in the US is not painted directly, either. It is textured [0]. I'll go out on a limb and say that a substantial majority these days are orange peel texture on the walls and knockdown on the ceiling, made primarily with drywall mud (Artex seems to be essentially the same thing). I'm not sure I would want a plaster skim in any case. I grew up in a house built in 1914 that had lath & plaster, and I've cursed the brittle plaster many times. We even had actual picture rails but my mom never liked to use them to actually hang pictures, amusingly enough. [0] To be brutally honest, the texturing isn't for any particular reason aside from how well it hides minor imperfections. Having someone skim coat the walls and ceiling with a perfectly smooth finish is definitely a thing, but it's a good bit more labor intensive.
  - nkurz 8mo ago
    > Probably 99% of all drywall in the US is not painted directly, either. I'm not sure about the exact numbers, but I'm pretty certain this is a vast overestimate. I've painted a more than average number of interior walls in the US (both personally and professionally) and except for a few that were wood, adobe, or lath and plaster, all the rest involved painting directly on drywall. Sometimes the base paint was applied with a thick nap roller to achieve a degree of texture, but I never textured one with something else before painting. All I can guess is that there are large regional or cultual differences here, and each of us is having a very localized experience.

MarkMarine 8mo ago

I think this misses the beauty of a plaster wall. Level 5 drywall has nothing on a skilled artisan with plaster, and yeah you can’t hang things through it but it also lasts hundreds of years. My walls are 120 years old and robust, the kids haven’t damaged them and they’ve more than held up.

asdff 8mo ago
You can hang things through it just as easy as drywall too. Light stuff just put it right into the lathe. Heavy stuff, with both types of walls you are going to want to anchor into a stud.
- franktankbank 8mo ago
  How do you find yourself a lath? Try once if it doesn't hit then move up/down a 3/4 inch.
  - kevin_thibedeau 8mo ago
    You can see it on a thermal camera with a high resolution sensor from China (not the ITAR limited US tech).
    - amluto 8mo ago
      Got a link? This sounds handy.
      - kevin_thibedeau 8mo ago
        Thermal Master P3: 25fps, 256x192, manual focus
        blincoln 8mo ago
        Looks like it's improved even further - I'm seeing that model listed with 512x384 resolution, and it's $300 on Amazon. Pretty incredible! I felt like I was getting an amazing deal when I paid about $1000 15 years ago for a FLIR E4 that I could flash into an E8. I might finally retire that in favour of one of these.

fractallyte 8mo ago

There are reasons not to like gypsum drywall: > Some buildings standing today still have wattle-and-daub panels from 700 years ago. Will any drywalled building survive even a tenth of this time? > The plaster mixture used then was a homegrown concoction, with recipes matching the climate needs and vernacular material availability. The wonder of wattle-and-daub (clay) and plaster-and-lath (lime) is that the materials are breathable, move with the structure, and can even self-repair small cracks. I don't know of any old house that suffers from black mold... My last big gripe with gypsum drywall is disposal. Demolish a property with clay or lime walls, and they'll naturally degrade into the environment. Drywall needs proper disposal: "Do not burn: Drywall releases toxic fumes. Do not bury: It can create dangerous hydrogen sulfide gas in landfill." Does anyone want to live with that?

kogasa240p 8mo ago
>Do not bury: It can create dangerous hydrogen sulfide gas in landfill." Wonder if in the future there will be incentives for proper disposal since you can extract hydrogen from it, other than that I agree with you.
rootusrootus 8mo ago
> I don't know of any old house that suffers from black mold... For much the same reason they don't suffer from low heating bills, either.
kbelder 8mo ago
I was just reading how it's common to pulverize gypsum drywall to mix into dense clay soils to loosen it up.

asdff 8mo ago

> It’s impossible to mount even lightweight items such as picture frames onto the wall, because even the tiniest hole from nails or the like would crumble and erode into dust. The trick for this is to just find the stud. Same thing you'd have to do in drywall. For light stuff like photos, you can get away with putting a nail right into the lathe without having to find a stud. If you miss the lathe (you can tell) just move the nail up a half inch.

aidos 8mo ago
Ha! If I even look at my lath and plaster walls the wrong way a little bit crumbles away.
- asdff 8mo ago
  The trick is to have 100 years of landlord special paint holding it together
  - throw_away92r 8mo ago
    And with the old lead paint lowering your mental capacity as the years go by, you care even less about small inconstencies
    - asdff 8mo ago
      Safely contained behind several tenants worth of turnover or so I'm told. Walls are skip trowelled so inconsistency is just how they are.
  - franktankbank 8mo ago
    Wallpaper can be semi structural.
kevin_thibedeau 8mo ago
You really need to predrill through the lath. Old lath is much harder than freshly milled wood. If you hit anywhere off the stud it can cause the lath to flex and break the backside keying off. This leads to delamination with enough accumulated damage.

jf___ 8mo ago

A huge share of the gypsum used in drywall is *synthetic gypsum* — a byproduct of flue-gas desulfurization (FGD) at coal-fired power plants. When SO₂ is scrubbed from exhaust using limestone, the reaction produces calcium sulfate dihydrate, chemically identical to mined gypsum. In the US, FGD gypsum has accounted for roughly half of all gypsum consumed by the wallboard industry at its peak. The "cheap, uniform, and free of defects" story is partly a story about coal. The drywall industry scaled on the back of an abundant, nearly free waste stream from the energy sector. It's a classic example of industrial symbiosis — one industry's pollution abatement becomes another's feedstock. And it cuts the other way now: as coal plants shut down across Europe and North America, synthetic gypsum supply is shrinking. The drywall industry is facing a real raw material squeeze, with manufacturers having to shift back toward mined gypsum or find alternative sources. There's ongoing work on using phosphogypsum (from fertilizer production) but that comes with its own radioactivity concerns. For someone in your position this is particularly relevant — the "wonder" of drywall is entangled with the fossil fuel economy in a way that makes earth-based construction methods look increasingly attractive as that supply chain unwinds.

xnx 8mo ago
Fascinating. I wonder if supply constraints will make drywall recycling profitable.
- PlunderBunny 8mo ago
  I don’t know about other countries, but in New Zealand there’s already recycling of leftover bits of drywall (we call it ‘gib board’ after a brand name). All the big building companies will accept leftover bits of gib board, but small bits can be thrown directly in your garden beds to help break up clay. The gypsum used in New Zealand is mined locally.
  - teruakohatu 8mo ago
    I was just wondering where our gypsum came from, I always assumed it was mined. Thank you for the information.

m0llusk 8mo ago

some interesting new failure modes also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_drywall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_drywall

mrexroad 8mo ago
new? that was literally two decades ago.

ghtbircshotbe 8mo ago

1. Is plaster and lath gypsum based? In my experience plaster is basically identical to stucco, which is basically just mortar with increasingly fine sand. It is very hard and completely unlike drywall. 2) Why emphasize asbestos when talking about plaster? My understanding is you likely have more to worry about if you have a house from say the 40s-70s, which almost universally have some sort of drywall product.

evnp 8mo ago
We had our circa-1915 house checked for asbestos before lifting it. The inspector laughed after taking a chip out of the plaster because you could clearly see horse hair protruding from every side of the chip. This is apparently unlikely to overlap with asbestos, though it comes instead with a minor (?) anthrax risk. I'll take that over the dust from drywall sanding every time though.
jccooper 8mo ago
"Plaster" can be lime, gypsum, or cement, in rough order of historical adoption. Sometimes you even use different types on the same wall; cement rough coat and lime or gypsum top coat, for example.

KevinMS 8mo ago

> Because drywall is a dense and uniform mixture, hanging anything off the wall (from pictures to heavier items like shelves, TVs, or even cabinetry) is a trivial exercise, either a simple nail for a small frame, plaster anchors for medium loads, or toggle bolts for the real heavy hitters. yikes

andwur 8mo ago
That's inaccurate for standard thickness drywall sheet, which is usually a 20kg maximum parallel load (e.g. vertical for a wall) regardless of fixing method. Orthogonal load is even less. You might be able to attach a TV or cabinet but it would definitely not be safe, any additional weight or dynamic load would quite likely rip it off the wall with no warning. The recommended approach for anything with moderate weight or above is to anchor to the studs and never rely on the drywall itself for retention.
- c0nsumer 8mo ago
  I suspect they are meaning because it's uniform you can easily find the studs through it and fasten things directly into them. An uneven wall material (plaster on lathe, or even plaster on drywall as we have in most of our house) can be quite a hassle to find the actual timbers/studs behind.
  - hedora 8mo ago
    Modern plaster has the same properties, and works well with stud finders. On a related note, if you can find a strong rare earth magnet, you can use it as a stud finder. It'll be attracted to the nails used to hold up the drywall / plaster backer boards. They sell purpose built ones with felt backs + built in bubble levels if you want to get fancy.
quesera 8mo ago
Very yikes. Also wrong: > By eschewing the lath lattices, buildings now have way more room in wall cavities for improved insulation and conduits The cavities are exactly the same size, plaster+lath, or drywall. Most residential construction won't use conduit anywhere, and commercial construction would never bury a conduit inside a wall, regardless of wall covering. These are weird things to get wrong.

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

BadBadJellyBean 8mo ago

As a German I always found North American houses and their drywall and wood constructions incredibly odd. It always felt flimsy to me. From my experience we just started using drywall for some interior walls on some newly built homes. But throughout my life I was used to very massive walls. I recently saw some house building videos and it is somehow fascinating how different the building materials and methodologies are. North America obviously made it work, but still very odd to me.

rootusrootus 8mo ago
I think it's just what you get used to. Every method has ups and downs. And different regions are going to gravitate to different materials based on availability (for example, my Indian coworkers just cannot fathom why we would ever build houses from trees instead of reinforced concrete; doesn't it rot?!!). I don't think of the walls as especially flimsy, though. Built correctly, they are totally fine. Yes you can punch a hole in one if you are sufficiently motivated (and you better miss the stud...), but the only times I've ever punched any hole in drywall it was because the door stop was removed for whatever reason and a dumb teenager threw the door open with no regard for propriety. At least drywall is trivial to fix.
- BadBadJellyBean 8mo ago
  > Yes you can punch a hole in one if you are sufficiently motivated This is what I meant with "flimsy". If I hit my wall my hand breaks. But as I said It seems to work. I am just used to the massive nature of our houses and I admit a part of me prefers it that way but I don't think it's the one true way.
- lostlogin 8mo ago
  > why we would ever build houses from trees instead of reinforced concrete Earthquakes are a factor where we are, but also, if NZ can find a way to do something cheaper, we will always do it. Quality be damned.
  - usrnm 8mo ago

elendee 8mo ago

But the noise.. this has been a huge factor in my quality of life, having lived in both buildings. That issue trumps any advantage drywall has, and I spent about 10 years working with it as well. I think the market forces have simply dominated our natural, economically inefficient, home-dwelling instincts. I think this article means well, but it is written from the perspective of a landlord basically.

nkrisc 8mo ago
It's not really a drywall problem, but a drawback of the usual construction method. If you insulate the interior walls then noise isn't really a problem. Of course, most builders are not insulating or noise-proofing interior walls, so there you have it. I suppose with other building materials (bricks, concrete blocks) you get the solution "for free", so to speak.
- ragall 8mo ago
  It's a problem because with stick frame and drywall, the builder has to take special effort to noise-isolate a house, which in effects ensures that not even 0.1% of housing has those properties. European regulations make for a much higher noise isolation by default.
  - hedora 8mo ago
    Noise barriers are incredibly cheap. They're a tiny fraction of the cost of putting up a drywall or plaster wall. Codes say how far apart the studs should be, so you just buy a roll of batting, and unroll it into the gap between the two walls. You have to cut it to fit, but that's not a big deal. It costs a few thousand bucks to do a whole house (during construction), even in areas with high labor costs. You can usually tack it on to the cost of insulating the exterior walls (which is basically the same process, but with a more expensive material).
    - ragall 8mo ago
      Nobody does it. Not even supposedly "luxury condos". And that's assuming it's really that cheap, which it isn't because to be effective, one needs to stop all sound transmission, not just for walls, but floors too, as well as interrupting the noise transmitted through the house's wooden structure. It's quite expensive.

porknubbins 8mo ago

If I ever get to build a house I’m using that high density drywall they have in hospitals everywhere but the ceiling. It doesn’t cost that much more compared to the labor and it would be enormously satisfying to know your walls can’t be easily dented or damaged.

hedora 8mo ago

Drywall is terrible vs. modern plaster. Modern plaster has backing boards that are similar to drywall, so you get most of the construction advantages (except for the labor intensive step of plastering), and can hand pictures / toggle bolts in the same way. Unlike plaster, drywall gets moldy + needs to be replaced after water damage. I think this is why films with old buildings set in Europe often show peeling paint / water damaged plaster, but people are still living in them, and it seems fine. In the US, buildings with that level of wear would be so moldy they'd need to be gutted to studs, at minimum. The article touches on mold resistant drywall, but I'll believe it when I see it. Also, apparently, it is much easier to create long-lasting patches for plaster than drywall.

turtlebits 8mo ago
It's more important to control moisture than buy moisture resistant materials. Drywall is great, its cheap and easy to repair. I would not want to live in any water damaged house without remediation due to the risk of mold.
DANmode 8mo ago
> In the US, buildings with that level of wear would be so moldy they'd need to be gutted to studs, at minimum. Middle America and the rust belt would like a word (and the word is: mycotoxins, lol).

ericwebb 8mo ago

I am also a fortunate owner of a 100+ year old home. Why is the lath and plaster so susceptible to cracking?! That is my nemesis. I haven’t tried to hang a TV though yet.

deadbabe 8mo ago

I stayed with a guy in France who had an old house with these picture rail things, and it was the first time I had come across something like that. I thought it was a very interesting solution for quickly rearranging artwork in your home if you love art but don't have enough wall space to display all your pieces so you might occasionally swap them.

turtlebits 8mo ago

Drywall is pretty amazing, but I don't agree with all the points in the article. It cheap to buy and cheap to install, easy to cut and installs fast. It's tolerant with imperfect walls and is surprisingly flexible. It can also be seamlessly repaired. It can also act as a primary air barrier. I do not like moisture resistant drywall, moisture control is more important as well as using proper materials in high humidity areas.

quokwok 8mo ago

Works In Progress have an odd antipathy to picture rails. Actually, picture rails are good. You don't have to fill any holes if you wish to move or remove a picture. To put up a picture rail, you can drill multiple holes laterally until you find a stud. The unused holes will be covered by the rail.

wellf 8mo ago

What about cement render? Seems like plaster board and plastering was only mentioned. I am sure plastering was common in 80s too but maybe misremembering. edit: seen other comments and that was/is "modern plastering" i.e. with backing boards.

ReptileMan 8mo ago

> The popular additive was asbestos. While today we all know about its intense toxicity Asbestos is not toxic. The mechanism by which it fucks up your lungs is completely different.

webnrrd2k 8mo ago

If you're interested in this kind of material, I'd recommend checking out Construction Physics by Brian Potter. https://www.construction-physics.com https://www.construction-physics.com

kristianp 8mo ago
Yes and it's often posted on hn: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=construction-physics.com https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=construction-physics....

aristofun 8mo ago

One thing I know for sure - this thing benefits mainly builders and renovators, not end users.

xnx 8mo ago

A lot of the criticism of drywall here is improved by double-upping.