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.
This reminds me a bit of Hank Green's recent video on why we don't recycle plastic. The answer is we frack a lot of methane for electricity and ethane is a byporoduct of that. You can flare it off or use it as a negative cost ingredient for polyethane / many other plastics. As long as we're using lots of fossil fuels the byproducts will be cheap. Anyone who has played gregtech or factorio or similar already has an intuition for this. The answer then becomes simple: if you want less plastic you must use less fossil fuel. They are one and the same.
I used to work for a drywall manufacturer who still owned their own mines despite efforts to divest from them by some. They always viewed it as a structural advantage to still own them and not be wholly dependent on the coal plants (which effectively have conveyor belts going from the coal plants to the wallboard plants). I imagine as time goes on it'll become even more of an advantage for them to still own those mines as their competitors are forced to buy at highly inflated prices (or even from them) as coal shuts down.
> 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.
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.
I love exposed everything in construction. Every plumbing and electrical problem that required me to call someone involved the thing being hidden for aesthetic reasons.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Stick frame buildings are prone to dry rot, very susceptible to molding, and the addition of drywalls* make them objectively inferior for any building that's expected to last more than ~40-50 years. It used to be, 100 years ago, that the big cities like NYC, Chicago, Cincinnati, etc... were so dynamic that entire neighbourhoods were expected to be rebuilt every ~50 years or so. That's no longer the case.
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'm not familiar with life in SE Asia. All I know is I've been to Malaysia, Thailand, Taiwan, Hong Kong and the levels of humidity were gruesome. I once wanted to bring a leather bag as a gift to a friend in Taiwan and he asked not to bother because it will likely get moldy.
> 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.
Drywall gets maligned, but it is a pretty remarkable building material. Inexpensive, easy to fix/finish, and very fire-resistant, especially for its weight.
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.
I have heard (from a German co-worker) that you tend to double-up the drywall. Sheets go on vertically, then a second layer horizontally to double the thickness—improve soundproofing.
Flimsy? No. I mean they won't survive a tornado, but homes aren't usually built with surviving a direct tornado hit in mind.
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.
I suspect the prevalence of "flimsy" wood and drywall constructions to be part of the reason why Americans dislike apartment living. They provide little sound insulation, are prone to water damage, have a shorter lifespan than the average person and once they catch fire they burn the entire thing down.
Concrete or brick buildings are much nicer to live in, but expensive, so they are not very common among new constructions.
I live in rock and rolling California, and we love our stick framed houses. They’re very resilient to the tremblors that plague us.
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.
For a while in the 90s, a friend from Canada went to Germany and started building NA style houses (wood frame, drywall) in Germany. People loved that it could be finished in 3 months instead of 9-12 and cost 1/3 less, IIRC.
They're happy until the long-term effects hit them, as stick frame houses need repairs a lot more often. Nowadays, European companies have developed many modular building techniques that have reduced the labor considerably, from robots that 3D-print concrete walls, to LEGO-like hollow bricks.
I am sitting here in a 100+ year old stick frame house. The siding and shingles were replaced 10 years ago. There hasn't been any major structural work for at least 40 years.
Most houses have asphalt shingles with an expected lifetime of ~15 years after which they start leaking and subject the house to the risk of mold. Contrast with ceramic tile shingles which easily last 75-100 years.
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.
As a German I have to admit we are culturally odd with this. Our houses are way too over constructed and the dry-wall stigma here is just one aspect of it, wood construction stigma is another. It thus is no wonder that Americans have way more affordable housing.
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.
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
Stein auf Stein, Brick on Brick. It's what makes the German feel safe. It will last forever. I will break everything but the walls if I hit them. I need heavy machinery to put a screw into the wall. It feels right for the German. Wooden houses are for eccentric people with too much money for a disposable house.
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.
The way houses are built and what materials are used is very location specific do to climate and economics. North America has oodles of land to grow wood on. When you have cheap nails and screws wood is a FANTASTIC material to make houses out of and not flimsy at all when designed correctly. Europe used to make houses out of wood until they cut down all of their forests. Wood and drywall construction has the advantage of being fast to build and easy to remodel.
I personally like houses that use Insulated Concrete Forms for the exterior walls.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Many people only think of picture rail as what you find in old Victorian homes, but modern picture rail can be much less obtrusive and lightweight. I have a lot of framed art as well. When I finally bought a house I installed STAS minirail throughout. The "wires" are transparent Perlon filament, and anything you hang can instantly be adjusted vertically and horizontally.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
yeah, my parents' US home (which was originally my grandmother's) in the eastern half of the US has plaster-on-drywall construction.
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...
re: finding studs. unless it's balloon framing, you'll hit the bottom plate in normal stick home construction (and if not, you probably should air seal that gap...). The most consistent and easiest way to find studs is hovering a neodymium magnet across the wall to find the drywall screws. I haven't used my stud finder in years b/c of how much more reliable this is. Plus, it works even if you've doubled up your drywall (e.g. 2x 5/8in w/ green glue for sound abatement, etc).
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.
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.
> 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.
My experience (South and NE US) is that walls are painted and ceilings are textured. More labor is required to produce a good finish on a drywall ceiling and knockdown and popcorn finishes arose to reduce construction costs.
> 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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Mass production should be able to make this standard. Walls don't vary that much.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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."
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.
This reminds me a bit of Hank Green's recent video on why we don't recycle plastic. The answer is we frack a lot of methane for electricity and ethane is a byporoduct of that. You can flare it off or use it as a negative cost ingredient for polyethane / many other plastics. As long as we're using lots of fossil fuels the byproducts will be cheap. Anyone who has played gregtech or factorio or similar already has an intuition for this. The answer then becomes simple: if you want less plastic you must use less fossil fuel. They are one and the same.
https://youtu.be/325HdQe4WM4
Isn't that common knowledge, that plastics aren't feasible without fossil fuels?
I used to work for a drywall manufacturer who still owned their own mines despite efforts to divest from them by some. They always viewed it as a structural advantage to still own them and not be wholly dependent on the coal plants (which effectively have conveyor belts going from the coal plants to the wallboard plants). I imagine as time goes on it'll become even more of an advantage for them to still own those mines as their competitors are forced to buy at highly inflated prices (or even from them) as coal shuts down.
Or AI’s thirst for power will bring coal back.
Why would heightened electricity demand increase the use of the most expensive energy source?
Potentially due to a shortage of electricity from cheaper searches. There is also political pressure to keep certain coal fired power plants open.
https://apnews.com/article/tennessee-valley-authority-coal-p...
> 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.
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.
> You have to break open the wall to fix things
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.
> no one wants exposed screw holes
Wouldn't bother me. But I'm an engineer. But I think the holes can be plugged with removable plugs.
I love exposed everything in construction. Every plumbing and electrical problem that required me to call someone involved the thing being hidden for aesthetic reasons.
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.
Fascinating. I wonder if supply constraints will make drywall recycling profitable.
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.
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.
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.
Stick frame buildings are prone to dry rot, very susceptible to molding, and the addition of drywalls* make them objectively inferior for any building that's expected to last more than ~40-50 years. It used to be, 100 years ago, that the big cities like NYC, Chicago, Cincinnati, etc... were so dynamic that entire neighbourhoods were expected to be rebuilt every ~50 years or so. That's no longer the case.
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.
Thank you for including southeast Asia (and other humid places) in the discussion :)
I'm not familiar with life in SE Asia. All I know is I've been to Malaysia, Thailand, Taiwan, Hong Kong and the levels of humidity were gruesome. I once wanted to bring a leather bag as a gift to a friend in Taiwan and he asked not to bother because it will likely get moldy.
> 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.
> 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.
Drywall gets maligned, but it is a pretty remarkable building material. Inexpensive, easy to fix/finish, and very fire-resistant, especially for its weight.
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.
I have heard (from a German co-worker) that you tend to double-up the drywall. Sheets go on vertically, then a second layer horizontally to double the thickness—improve soundproofing.
Flimsy? No. I mean they won't survive a tornado, but homes aren't usually built with surviving a direct tornado hit in mind.
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.
Wood and drywall is how most houses in Sweden are built as well.
Here's a timelapse of a Swedish house being built: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbSm0Zw00Cs
I suspect the prevalence of "flimsy" wood and drywall constructions to be part of the reason why Americans dislike apartment living. They provide little sound insulation, are prone to water damage, have a shorter lifespan than the average person and once they catch fire they burn the entire thing down.
Concrete or brick buildings are much nicer to live in, but expensive, so they are not very common among new constructions.
I live in rock and rolling California, and we love our stick framed houses. They’re very resilient to the tremblors that plague us.
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.
For a while in the 90s, a friend from Canada went to Germany and started building NA style houses (wood frame, drywall) in Germany. People loved that it could be finished in 3 months instead of 9-12 and cost 1/3 less, IIRC.
They're happy until the long-term effects hit them, as stick frame houses need repairs a lot more often. Nowadays, European companies have developed many modular building techniques that have reduced the labor considerably, from robots that 3D-print concrete walls, to LEGO-like hollow bricks.
I am sitting here in a 100+ year old stick frame house. The siding and shingles were replaced 10 years ago. There hasn't been any major structural work for at least 40 years.
What is your definition of "often"?
Most houses have asphalt shingles with an expected lifetime of ~15 years after which they start leaking and subject the house to the risk of mold. Contrast with ceramic tile shingles which easily last 75-100 years.
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.
As a German I have to admit we are culturally odd with this. Our houses are way too over constructed and the dry-wall stigma here is just one aspect of it, wood construction stigma is another. It thus is no wonder that Americans have way more affordable housing.
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.
> Our houses are way too over constructed
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.
Stein auf Stein, Brick on Brick. It's what makes the German feel safe. It will last forever. I will break everything but the walls if I hit them. I need heavy machinery to put a screw into the wall. It feels right for the German. Wooden houses are for eccentric people with too much money for a disposable house.
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.
The way houses are built and what materials are used is very location specific do to climate and economics. North America has oodles of land to grow wood on. When you have cheap nails and screws wood is a FANTASTIC material to make houses out of and not flimsy at all when designed correctly. Europe used to make houses out of wood until they cut down all of their forests. Wood and drywall construction has the advantage of being fast to build and easy to remodel.
I personally like houses that use Insulated Concrete Forms for the exterior walls.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Many people only think of picture rail as what you find in old Victorian homes, but modern picture rail can be much less obtrusive and lightweight. I have a lot of framed art as well. When I finally bought a house I installed STAS minirail throughout. The "wires" are transparent Perlon filament, and anything you hang can instantly be adjusted vertically and horizontally.
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.
Yep same. Super easy to install.
Do picture rails work for gallery walls (clusters of frames)?
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
I think so. https://www.stasgroup.com/en
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…
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.
I really like this guy's drywall-install how-to videos: https://www.youtube.com/@vancouvercarpenter
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.
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.
yeah, my parents' US home (which was originally my grandmother's) in the eastern half of the US has plaster-on-drywall construction.
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...
re: finding studs. unless it's balloon framing, you'll hit the bottom plate in normal stick home construction (and if not, you probably should air seal that gap...). The most consistent and easiest way to find studs is hovering a neodymium magnet across the wall to find the drywall screws. I haven't used my stud finder in years b/c of how much more reliable this is. Plus, it works even if you've doubled up your drywall (e.g. 2x 5/8in w/ green glue for sound abatement, etc).
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.
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.
> 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.
My experience (South and NE US) is that walls are painted and ceilings are textured. More labor is required to produce a good finish on a drywall ceiling and knockdown and popcorn finishes arose to reduce construction costs.
“Level 5” drywall has a skim coat of plaster over it. It’s very common.
> 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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
How do you find yourself a lath? Try once if it doesn't hit then move up/down a 3/4 inch.
You can see it on a thermal camera with a high resolution sensor from China (not the ITAR limited US tech).
Got a link? This sounds handy.
Pretty much but the wall is mostly lathe so you usually hit first go.
“You’re in luck if you’ve been hankering to have your wall connected to wifi.”
It’s so they can begin selling you a subscription to allow you to hang a picture.
some interesting new failure modes also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_drywall
new? that was literally two decades 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?
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
It's the repainting that bothers me
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Mass production should be able to make this standard. Walls don't vary that much.
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.
Odds are you are compromising the fire safety of your residence by doing this.
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.
it's pretty cool how the paper faces effectively provide all the strength by creating a torsion box w/ the gypsum in the middle.
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.
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.
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.
If you think the drywall access situation is bad, don't start working on your cars.
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.
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.
Maybe you're thinking of poly-B, not PEX.
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.
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.
No -- use doors.
So a bunch of doors everywhere you don't open for potentially 100 years?
Cheaper than building them behind concrete or brick.
I think the question is: why are they behind anything to begin with?
Conduit all the things and paint to match?
This is essentially what some industrial-style lofts do.
Probably not legal.
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.
You don’t need to explain that to me.
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.
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?
> 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.
>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.
Ctrl F "brick". Nothing about bricks and concrete in all the history of wall surfaces.
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.
I was thinking of fired brick and concrete, which solves much of his problems of drilling into walls.