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Comment by taneq | Hacker News Reader

3D printing isn’t going to make houses hugely much cheaper. The lion’s share of the cost of a house is fit-out. Doors, windows, lighting, plumbing, cabinets, tiling, painting. What needs to happen is modular designs where the house is made out of standardised ready-made components that are mass produced in a factory and plug together to form a finished house.

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I've never understood why we go through so much work, to coat the interior of our houses with easily damaged and difficult to repair materials. Who thought it was a good idea to compress dust between sheets of paper, nail it to the framing, then spray a texture onto it with more dust, and color that with a film of plastic that's cured in place, so it needs multiple coats to be thick enough to provide a consistent color?

The people who write the fire protection codes thought it was a good idea, because drywall gives you enough time to get out in a fire.

Manufactured homes (i.e. trailers) will have wallpaper integrated into the paper of the drywall so that the painting step can be skipped. Most people don't want this and would rather pay more to have a painted wall.

Have you ever seen what plastering a wall entails? Have you calculated what it would cost to install wood paneling given lumber prices?

Drywall is incredibly fast to install and two sheets of 5/8” drywall will give you a 4 hour fire rating.

It's because it's cheaper up-front.

Its also cheap, and fire retardant compared to other finishing. It used to be lathe+plaster. And before that plain wood.

I think 3-D printing is still important. You can build the heaviest and most “untransportable” part using 3-D printing which is accurate enough to leave appropriate gaps for the fit out where it’s plug-and-play and those components are mass produced in a factory.

I would also like it if the modular units could self drive so I can take my house on vacation.

https://insideevs.com/reviews/796924/pebble-flow-electric-rv...

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