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Comment by asdff | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

> Old lath is much harder than freshly milled wood

That is my piece of advice for anybody who is buying a house at least a hundred years old. Old lath is like iron, and you can do more damage than you expect if you just try to put a screw into it without pre-drilling.

Ha! If I even look at my lath and plaster walls the wrong way a little bit crumbles away.

The trick is to have 100 years of landlord special paint holding it together

Wallpaper can be semi structural.

And with the old lead paint lowering your mental capacity as the years go by, you care even less about small inconstencies

Safely contained behind several tenants worth of turnover or so I'm told. Walls are skip trowelled so inconsistency is just how they are.

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