The wonder of modern drywall
worksinprogress.news
worksinprogress.news
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.
The gypsum used in New Zealand is mined locally.
https://apnews.com/article/tennessee-valley-authority-coal-p...
I'm fine with arguing against coal for environmental reasons, but that won't convince anyone who isn't already convinced. It's always worth pointing out that gas turbines put out a lot less pollutants than coal.
Like coal mining jobs or the like, if you’re stuck in Appalachia with 5 kids and it’s the only thing keeping you afloat, you’ll get pretty worked up if someone tells you ‘just don’t do that, duh’.
Even if it’s probably correct in a macro sense.
You can make all the technical and environmental point you want. They are valid and they are largely irrelevant, at least for the purpose of achieving your stated outcome.
People want to be able to live a life with some amount of dignity and we've been so diligently eroding their ability to do so for the last 50 years that it's becoming an existential issue.
Jobs matter. If you want social progress, environmental progress, any kind of progress people need to be able to build a life where their children are better off than they were. Full stop.
AI/Data centers need power 24/7.
It’s also a timing/capital issue.
It will change eventually, but in the meantime people need their kWh.
That's funny, is marginally more expensive than natural gas because natural gas is a byproduct of oil extraction.
Coal is vastly cheaper as a 24x365 source of power than anything but hydro and natural gas.
24x7 every day of the year is much harder, though. Solar/wind + batteries are nowhere near cost competitive for reliability, though. You'd have to build a ridiculous (read: very uneconomical) multiple of typical battery capacity to make it through the long, cloudy, low-wind periods in the winter.
On the bright side, enhanced geothermal is starting to look like it may be economically competitive in the near future. If it pans out, it could repurpose a lot of the technology and labor force from the oil and gas industry to instead produce clean power. And who knows—maybe the current nuclear push will pan out and we'll have another option for reliable base load.
I keep thinking of that scene in Brazil where the hero, Harry Tuttle, opens a modular wall panel in Sam's apartment.
We standardized on 16 inch stud spacing here in the US a long time ago when we likely still used cement with a plaster skim coat on wood lath. Cutting up a board of nearly the same stuff feels primitive. You have to break open the wall to fix things.
To me the next logical step is a standard for modular walls that are laid out on a grid structure. I get that no one wants exposed screw holes but I can think of ways to hide them or make them part of a decorative pattern to blend them in. The coverings would be made to be cut to size as well. Wall panels would have to be environmentally friendly so wood is a first choice in natural and/or composite forms.
If you think this will look boxy then look up the passive house and notes on home building. Homes with a winding structure are difficult to seal reliably and roof so a boxy home is actually more economically friendly in terms of insulation to reduce HVAC energy consumption.
The best is to build in such a way as to not have to fix them in the first place. European standards mandate passing all wiring through corrugated tubes. Builders add spare empty ones for future expansion, which makes it unnecessary to open the walls in most cases.
Incorrect. It's usually done, because it's a good idea, but nobody says you have to.
As an electrician of two decades, my commonest USA gripes are these:
•) grounding wires should always have insulation, too (instead of just bare)
•) modern NM isn't protected enough (neither physically nor chemically)
•) jboxes should have better wire anchoring inside, and bigger in general
•) oldwork cut-in jboxes aren't substantial enough even perfectly installed for long-term use (if you screw them to an adjacent stud they're great, but this is against code for grounding reasons).
It’s hard to articulate how wildly different habits are in Europe vs US around things like ‘what electrical appliances I have’ partially because of this.
Housing tends to be a lot smaller too, largely due to population density differences, but also overall differences in economic earning power and ease of buying things.
It absolutely is different from typical US housing, because unless you want to run surface mount everything (which most people don’t in residential), it’s an insane amount of work to run new anything.
‘40’s homes in the US, you typically just tear down to the studs, re-run new stuff, and throw up new drywall. Boom, done.
Unless you’re in a place that did block/brick etc like some of the big cities, then yeah it’s a nightmare there too.
At that point, most people will just do a full teardown.
Terrible carbon footprint for concrete too.
I know modern structures are better but I also don’t entirely trust block in an earthquake. Obviously less of a concern in most (not all!) of Europe.
A sign of the restlesness. Once you find a house to settle in, why would you need to change it ? European houses are typically versatile, US houses aren't due to having closets (which make a room's layout very inflexible) as well as electrical outlets being mandated exactly in the middle of the wall precisely where one would like to place furniture. US building codes are beyond stupid.
> Terrible carbon footprint for concrete too.
Carbon footprint is not that important. I want comfort. More specifically: if you are somewhat wealthy (in the top 10% of incomes, like most of the people here), in the continental Europe you can nowadays easily buy an apartment in a Passivhaus (or almost if renovated) building, with underfloor heating throughout the place, supplied by a geothermal heat pump, with triple-glazed windows and external covers that give you the utmost quietness even when there's traffic just outside. You can't get that in the US because even if you were willing to pay, there exist only a handful of construction companies that know how to build that, and they're all booked for years.
> I know modern structures are better but I also don’t entirely trust block in an earthquake. Obviously less of a concern in most (not all!) of Europe.
You can take a look at Japan. Modern buildings can withstand earthquakes. The issue in the US is that developers are allowed to just build without a civil engineer or architect designing the building. I wouldn't trust that either.
Europe has few trees and few earthquakes (outside of Romania, Italy, etc). Masonry houses make sense.
In California unreinforced masonry is illegal and trees are plentiful. Making houses out of sticks is rational even if it's unsightly.
Those asphalt roofs though...
Or the dozens of structures in Italy that came crashing down, like the various bridges over the past twenty years (250 bridge collapse events in Italy between January 2000 and July 2025).
Yes us Europeans are indeed superior and we never pick the wrong building material ever.
Houses change a lot over time, it is nice to be adaptable and not need to carve out stone and concrete every time you add a feature to a home.
The most beautiful homes I have been inside in Europe were wooden cabins in Sweden. The exposed wood ceiling beams, the unpainted wooden panels everywhere, the little details. I never had that with stone or brick buildings. Mainly because they got plastered and painted over, you almost never see the raw materials on the inside.
I guess at one point people would wonder why you would want to poop inside the home, and call it "sometimes people want stupid things".
Wouldn't bother me. But I'm an engineer. But I think the holes can be plugged with removable plugs.
I'm currently in an old house in Vietnam and I had to add exposed PVC piping to route around a leak inside a wall that was also feeding mold.
Half of the work involved each time I call someone is understanding the hidden stuff + getting stuff out of the way to see the hidden stuff.
"Engineering types" have built much of the world most of us actually live in. Yet a core piece of engineering——maintainability——is pathologically persistent.
"Once upon a time people were just glad to have running water, now it has to arrive by magic"
In his house there is a duct behind the skirting boards upstairs. You can fish a wire to most places from there.
His other pet hate was glued down cupboard flooring. Squeaky floors were a common complaint in new houses. It was normally caused by not levelling the first floor joists properly (levelling the tops is the correct way), and just dropping them on the walls. The solution industry came up with was to glue the tounges and grooves together, and later to glue the boards to the joists as well. This is a big problem if you need to take up the floor for a leaking pipe. Whereas before you just cut the tongue of a board with a circular saw, pulled it up, and put a noggin under the joint, now you have to destroy a board, and try and buy a similar one
It's wood that is nailed up in such a way that you can pretty easily remove and repair something and replace it.
However, inside wall things get done so rarely that the cost savings by using drywall more than covers paying someone to patch the drywall after a repair.
A middle ground is to run all utilities at the bottom or top of the wall, and use large baseboards/crown molding to cover it up.
It's similar to how car heaters work on waste heat from ICE and have to be accounted for in electric cars.
Other “tells” in the comment are the subscript “2” and the full spelling of the chemical. Also 3 emdashes
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.
I was at the Rijksmuseum recently and they use a wire system like this for all manner of configurations
This is way better than arguing with partner about the proper height, making a destructive hole, then having to cover/patch when opinions or artwork change. My walls are not drywall, so that was a big factor, but the freedom to arrange/rearrange is a major benefit.
No damage to paint so far, though we've only had them on the walls for about a year.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Have a look at that second link, and skip to 22.2.2011. At an about 12.51 it goes wild, and it lasted for years. It’s still shaking now.
https://earthquakelist.org/new-zealand/canterbury/christchur...
Over a lifespan of 100+ years that's very well expected in the US given that cities aren't growing much any more and infill has been made almost illegal in most places, using long-lasting materials and techniques like in Germany becomes a lot cheaper, and more convenient. It always surprises my US colleagues when I told them that in 20 years living in the house I grew up in, the only thing that ever broke were once the roof gutters due to very heavy rain. Otherwise, houses are expected to just go on and maybe need repairs every 50-60 years.
* drywalls are inherently sensitive to humidity, which makes it necessary to cover them with wall paint which is essentially a waterproof layer of plastic, which makes it not breathable and thus drywalls develop mold rather easily (even worse, it's often invisible mold). In contrast, walls made of stone, cement or brick (or a mix thereof) and covered in stucco are breathable and much more resilient to humidity and mold issues.
> I may be biased, because I live in a city filled with houses over 100 years old, and we get incessant rain. They seem to hold up fine
I wouldn't be so sure.
... or so you think. Mold contamination is most of the times invisible and triggers long-term chronic intoxication. People only realise there's a problem if the mold starts growing on the walls, at which point it's too late.
I have family like this.
Prolific recent media example: JK Rowling.
ChangeTheAirFoundation.org
This is probably one of the European vs. American divides though.
In my current Spanish town I don't know any building older than 1900. Rapid expansion of coastal towns due to European mobility caused that.
It's not really a European vs American divide, it is more country specific than that.
Edit: Ireland apparently has one of the youngest building age in Europe so I guess a 17th century pub is very rare and special there too.
Steel-reinforced ICF (Insulated Concrete Form) has become a much more common frame material for homes in the US, especially in the hurricane-prone southeast.
The closest major earthquake zone is in South Carolina, which had M7+ earthquakes as recently as the late 19th century.
Given how prevalent strong earthquakes are across most of the US, I always wonder if the few areas on the map without a known seismic hazard means we just haven't discovered it yet.
It does indeed.
There’s a portion of our populace who accepts waking up tired with flu-like symptoms daily.
Concrete or brick buildings are much nicer to live in, but expensive, so they are not very common among new constructions.
I've lived in pretty large buildings (eg dozens of units and four floors high) that were largely made of wood in both the northeast of the US and California.
They aren't high-rise buildings but I wouldn't argue they aren't apartment buildings, and they're far from uncommon.
It’s called a 5-over-1 and it’s so much cheaper than doing five stories of metal pan and concrete deck that the economics force the decision. You see these everywhere.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5-over-1
Anything over 6 stories will be concrete and steel, or rarely, engineered wood or timber framed.
Concrete and steel apartment buildings do not have vertical concrete partitions or wood stud walls between the units, they have steel stud walls with two layers of double 5/8” drywall on each side to provide a 4-hour fire rating.
I am a construction professional, FWIW.
That said, plenty of steel-framed apartments are effectively sound-proof. I’ve lived in them. You don’t need masonry, just wall mass.
Masonry can be engineered to US seismic standards but it is extremely uneconomical to do so. In my city, my house must be engineered to survive without structural damage an earthquake stronger than any in European recorded history. That’s not over-engineering, large parts of the US just have earthquakes that strong. It limits your material choices.
Similarly, US construction must also be engineered for extreme wind loading. Some of the buildings in my area are designed to withstand 300+ km/hr winds. Because that is a thing that can happen here.
Just about everything about US construction style can be explained by the necessity of engineering to survive extreme seismic and/or wind loading. Which it demonstrably does for the most part.
Once you start moving out of the dense parts of Tokyo, wood construction becomes a lot more prevalent for the same reason: it’s cheaper to build a stick house to code than it is to hire RC specialists.
It’s also quite expensive.
Normal Japanese construction has always been wood frame.
Some recent skyscrapers in severe seismic zones don't use conventional reinforced concrete. Their cores are built from welded steel plates, between which they pour concrete. It is much less labor-intensive and purportedly has excellent seismic properties.
I personally like houses that use Insulated Concrete Forms for the exterior walls.
The timber-stud and drywall model also works well for the modern world, where layout preferences and in-wall technology changes often. It was only about 20-25 years ago where having POTS lines/jacks in multiple rooms was cool, and now they're mostly useless.
It's mostly unused. I have PoE wifi access points around the house. And the sound system I hardly use.
Yea, if we’re hit hard enough, the stucco may or drywall may crack, but, big picture, those are cheap cosmetic fixes compared to anything more structural being damaged.
Back during the Northridge quake, my friend was buying a second floor condo in Santa Monica (which was hit pretty hard). It resulted in several drywall cracks, but nothing worse than that. Even better, the closing day was scheduled for the day after the quake.
Those stigmas are also odd for most of our heritage-like old towns that are full of still-intact "Fachwerk"-Wooden-Constructions - which basically use the same technique, should give us a hint or two. Also wooden constructions do allow to comply with our ever climbing ecology standards, without complicated venting mechanisms to keep mold out (as you need for stone). Those two stigmas are also odd, given, that drywall and wooden construction sectors are actually huge in Germany. Knauf is one of the worlds largest companies in the wallboard sector.
As much as I don't want to be a stereotypical German thick walls feel right to me. But I honestly don't think that our building style is the true one. It is just what I am used to.
They're not. The long-term reduction in maintenance costs more than make up for it. Tell a German that the "normal" North-American "common sense" is saving 1-2% of the house value every year for repairs and you'll be considered a madman.
> and the dry-wall stigma here is just one aspect of it, wood construction stigma is another
Both stigmas are very well justified.
Wooden structures allow for a lot cheaper adjustment later on (you usually have a few beams that are structurally important, often its just the outer walls that bear the load). If you try that with stone you can start with hiring an expert upfront or your house collapses.
Same goes energy efficiency. The isolation needs require thick plastic-covers on the outside (for stone), which are prone to mold, birds nests and lead to moss. Every residential stone building in Germany that is older than 10yrs provides you with a prime view through its plaster of where its plastic blocks are assembled, because of the moss. If you don't then they already paid the extra cost of recoating.
Every mortgage issuer will calculate 2-4% extra repair costs for the exterior alone. And we'Re not even talking about the venting, which officially requires a replacement and cleansing every 2-3 years, but of course nobody ever does it.
I could go on for hours about our German stonerism, but will end with the most funny thing, which is that most "stoners" are adamant about longevity vis-a-vis wood, pay extra for the stone, have to wait 3-5 times as long before they can actually move in (drying of mortar and screed can take up to year here in Germany) – but then the most important thing for longevity, the roof, will be made of wood ;-)
This led to the highly evolved wood-frame and steel-frame structures used in all construction in the US you see today. There are still a few old brick and masonry buildings from before these building codes, but most of the buildings from those eras collapsed in one disaster or another.
What is your definition of "often"?
Of course you might say that durable materials exist in North America, but almost nobody chooses them. The likelihood of being able to move somewhere and be able to buy a modern durable house is ~0% in NA, and 30-90% in Europe depending on country and location. So you can do it in NA if you have enough money to rebuild a house. Good luck with that.
That being said, if you want them, you can get them (this is how I know the above), and you can get other options. All of this is orthogonal to stick-frame construction. I've seen copper-roofs on stick-framed buildings even.
It's so fun watching Europeans reinvent the Soviet approach to building that they used to mock and shit on
Please explain why you think this is true, I disagree and I work in construction.
Once you get a roof and siding on a building, the framing material doesn’t matter. As long as it’s strong enough for the application, the building will remain standing, provided you maintain the roof and siding. I’m living in a balloon framed stick-built house that is 140 years old right now.
All that being said, I’d be skeptical as hell about buying a Lennar or similar tract house built in the last 30 years for the same reasons you stated. I run union electrical work and trust my electricians to do good work, but residential construction is a whole different ballgame, lower skill levels and lots of corner cutting. I will lose money on a job to complete a project correctly, if that’s what it takes. My company has to compete locally and our reputation matters. I don’t trust the people working at home builders to make the same choice, they shit out a bunch of houses and move on, while I have to maintain my reputation and keep customers coming back for a couple decades if I want to keep my job.
Let’s just say if I was having a house built, I’d GC it myself and conduct frequent site visits, probably daily.
My main point was a well-constructed stick built house can last a long time if it’s maintained, but determining if a house is well-built is not particularly easy without cutting walls open and so on.
I'm just saying - different people prefer different tradeoffs. My dad was his own GC in W. Germany in the late 60s and built our house. Took him years of working after-hours, etc. Sure, it's still standing. So is the "stick" house built around the same time in Canada that we bought used in the 80s. And the "stick" house I bought in the 00s in CA. Yes, we did the roof back then, and it's probably going to need a new roof soon - probably like 2-3% of the total value of the house. And possibly, putting solar panels on the house reduced it's lifespan. Oh yeah, our neighbors put clay tiles on the roof, which is an option.
It costs perhaps 50% more than a stick frame house and preserves its value much better because it's more durable. The house appreciation that people all over North America have been seeing is due to the land, not the building.
> different people prefer different tradeoffs
I don't think that everyone in North America would really prefer stick built, but due to regulations they have no choice and brick is much more expensive than just 50% extra.
There are a lot of variables at play and I am not sure the answer is to build stone houses like in parts of Germany.
Sure it's not as strong as brick or concrete blocks, but it's strong enough for normal, every day use.
Where it does pale in comparison is hanging heavy objects on the wall. You do need to secure heavy loads to a stud, instead of just drilling and anchoring anywhere in the wall. However what it lacks there it more than makes up for in ease of routing low-voltage cables in an existing home.
Also, if I really wanted it, I could knock out almost all of my interior walls and completely change the layout of my home. Not something you do on a whim, but you can absolutely do so when renovating a home.
Here's a timelapse of a Swedish house being built: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbSm0Zw00Cs
I watch a lot of building videos from the US, it’s eyeopening watching for someone used to better construction methods.
The construction of UK inner walls is even better, it”s often plaster applied on plasterboard/drywall usually by skilled trades. Very strong.
The only place that conduit is mandatory in residences in the US is Chicago.
Hell, most office buildouts in the US use very minimal amounts of conduit, most of the lightning and receptacle branch circuits are metal-clad cable (MC cable).
The UK is a damp place! We built one-off- houses. We built exclusively with 'brick and block'. Brick outside (to take the weather), cavity and block inside. Downstairs walls were block. Upstairs walls were studding, unless blocks were required to go up to support roof purlins.
The blocks inside were normally 'dry lined', sheets of 'plasterboard' (what we call drywall) 'dabbed' to the blocks with a plaster-like adhesive. Often these were 'Thermal boards', plasterboard laminated to urethane insulation foam. Plasterboard was always 'skimmed', plastered over with a plaster designed for this. The drying time is much lower than 'wet plastering' on the blocks.
On big spec built sites they were using prefab timber frames instead of blocks for the inner wall. Then they would plasterboard, and just fill the joints (no skimming). This is always considered a lower spec than skimmed walls.
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.
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).
One does not need to stop all sound transmission.
But, how many additional decades will you expect it for,
without giving your nervous system the rest it’s asking you for?
1) move to a very quiet neighbourhood that's far from downtown (DONE). My wife doesn't like the commute but we'll live with it for the moment.
2) get my startup going so that I can afford to buy a house and spend the ~1-2M required to renovate it Euro-style. Hopefully within 3-4 years. That way I'll be able to live basically in downtown (Midwest) but still have a comfortable house.
3) move back to Europe as soon as possible
P.s. I found Mack earplugs not that good. Honeywell Laser Lite are much better.
This is basically similar to how leaded drywall is used to shield X-rays. Of course, there are additional costs associated with the hazards of lead.
yikes
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
it is a bitch and a half for hanging anything (just like plaster on lath), plus it screws up wifi.
Pro tip for finding a stud, if you have access to the bare floor -- stick a drywalling knife / spatula under the bottom trim and poke. you can find the studs that way, and then measure off since 16" is pretty common. Measuring off the edge of an electrical box can work too, but you have to figure out what side of the stud the box is on...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Middle America and the rust belt would like a word (and the word is: mycotoxins, lol).
> 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?
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.
For much the same reason they don't suffer from low heating bills, either.
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.
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.
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?
Conduit all the things and paint to match?
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.
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.
Drywall is not too bad to deal with. And 99% of the wall surface doesn't need to be opened for a -long- time.
Drywall is manageable and cheap, I agree. But it's more painful than it should be for something that _will_ require maintenance.
And for telecom / low voltage, you have a lot of freedom of how you do it.
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.
Personally I've been printing snap in access panels whenever I have to get into a wall these days - in white PETG they pretty much disappear into the wall for me.
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.
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.
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.
Just make the house itself ~10% larger than it would be otherwise, so the usable floorspace is the same.
Adding/repairing wiring and plumbing would be easy. Every wall could have two layers of thermal/sound insulation. And who doesn't love secret passages?
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.
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.
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.
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.
It just takes one rat.
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.
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.
Asbestos is not toxic. The mechanism by which it fucks up your lungs is completely different.
> 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.