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.
This is different—the cost of plastic goes up if fossil fuel consumption goes down because currently it uses a waste stream. Not sure if it’s true, but it’s different than my prior intuition about fossil fuel and plastic.
Exactly - a common understanding of fossil fuels is that we could just "use them for planes and plastics" but there would be an unexpected cost there - because the plastics are basically "free" waste products of processing for other needs.
It's similar to how car heaters work on waste heat from ICE and have to be accounted for in electric cars.
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.
Coal is expensive, but it's still cheaper than nuke and peaker thermal. If you want power fast and your state and federal government aren't worried about a few pesky environmental regulations you might see coal come back. Part of coals attraction is that it takes a lot of people to run a coal plant, and people need jobs. Those people vote and politicians like votes.
Then you would plunk down a gas turbine like everyone else. It's so much cheaper than coal to operate and uses mostly the same high capex / long-lead machinery. I could see the jobs program angle, but these are shitty jobs. It's not like working in an air conditioned mcdonald's. Workers die in mines a lot and when they don't they live shorter, less comfortable lives with disease.
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.
Modern coal mining isn't that bad of a gig, especially surface mining (which a lot of coal is). I would certainly rather make a decent middle class wage hauling coal and support my family than work in an 'Air conditioned mcdonalds' and barely subsist in poverty.
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.
Gas turbines require infrastructure the may not exist in the area yet, and significant capital outlays.
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’.
Batteries make that less true today than in the past. Solar/wind + batteries are becoming cost-competitive with coal for energy on most days (24x7).
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.
Solar is cheap and abundant during daytime. It has zero power at night. Coal/gas/nukes are more expensive, but runs 24/7. Batteries are getting cheaper, but are still not that cheap.
In areas where there are gas transmission lines, sure. Large portions of the country don’t have that infrastructure built out yet, but do have rail lines which provide coal.
It’s also a timing/capital issue.
It will change eventually, but in the meantime people need their kWh.
I’ve never seem any analysis of feasibility for LNG (probably what you’re referring too) vs pipeline NG for things like power plants. Do we even have sufficient liquifaction facilities for that type of volume? When I hear of that kind of thing, it’s almost always liquifying for export to places like Europe.
> 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.
We have exactly what you want - it's called shiplap or car siding.
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.
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.
Having owned a couple European houses they’re horrible to alter and mediocre on energy. I miss nice adaptable wood structures. Bizarrely Europeans seem to think their cinderblock homes are nicer…
I've never wanted to adapt a house that significantly. But yeah, I much prefer the cinderblock homes and miss them. Something about the wood and drywall houses just feels incredibly cheap, and I don't like the aesthetic (de gustibus et coloribus..)
Houses change over time. A house could have been build in 1920 without a toilet or central heating. Then over time it got a fireplace on the second floor, an indoor toilet, indoor bathroom, then central heating with gas, extra insulation, a couple decades later double paned windows, hybrid heating with a heat pump, then full electric heating, underfloor heating, solar panels, home battery.
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.
It's not the unavailability of trees. European countries have wisely decides that cities built of wooden houses are prone to massive fires. USians haven't learned that lesson and the Los Angeles fire isn't going to be the last one.
A yes, the wise Europeans like the Dutch who have homes in Amsterdam that are sinking into the ground due to rotting wooden beams sinking in swamp ground and homes in Groningen with cracks all over due to the earthquakes that came with pumping gas out of the ground.
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.
> To each their own I guess. I’ll happily move walls, add or remove a bathroom, add windows, etc.
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.
There are residential jurisdictions within USA that require metal conduit between jboxes (e.g. Chicagoland) — initially more expensive, but much easier to modify/update. Flexible plastic conduit doesn't seem to offer barely any more protection than a standard US NM sheathed cable.
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).
That means everything in your house is literally set in stone. Sometimes people want to redecorate, have plumbing in a different location or a TV on a different wall.
My father grew up in a home without central heating or an indoor toilet. Last time that home was listed on the market it had underfloor heating, two bathrooms, triple paned glass, an extension on the roof and various other modern amenities. Times change, houses should too. We are not longer pooping in an outhouse anymore.
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".
Eh, people have a terrible time renovating or adding anything in housing in Europe. A lot of construction doesn’t have those tubes.
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's not any different from having to renovate a 40's house in the US. You'll have to redo all the plumbing and electrical system to current code. Corrugated tubes have been common since the 90s and mandatory shortly thereafter.
Most European housing is made of concrete, stone, or brick.
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.
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.
My dad, who has been a carpenter for over 50 years used to rail against boxing in pipes.
"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
Interesting comment with worthwhile content, but the writing style strongly smells of ChatGPT, and the phrase "For someone in your position" is incongruous (who is being addressed?). Did you use it, and if so, would you mind sharing the prompt?
They're a founder of a startup doing this kind of thing, realistically they probably copied blurb per-prepared marketing blurb or something they sent to someone else.
yeah, so the turn in EU towards renewable energy is driving fwd the business of earthen construction. our core (validated) product is printing earthen acoustic barriers at ~4-5m3/hr. panels from loam are a great alternative to gypsum; due to the hygrothermic characteristics of earth the moisture content is stabilised (constant in a ~50-55% bandwidth) which is a massive advantage in view of traditional materials. and fully circular. I'm a developer of pythonocc and tesseract-nanobind, and take pleasure in augmenting my thinking with a dash of ai.
There are 4 paragraphs and three of them have emdashes. You may use emdashes, but you use them orders of magnitude less frequently than current AI models.
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.
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.
We've had great luck with the removable 3M velcro picture hangers. (Each corner is held with two pieces of velcro that face each other. The velcro has double back tape on the back, which affixes to the wall and the picture. The double back tape is stretchy, and can be removed by pulling a tab. The tape is single use.
No damage to paint so far, though we've only had them on the walls for about a year.
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.
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 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. Not sure how long they’ll last but there hasn’t been any push to replace them.
Have you ever done a mold spore count in your house ? There's a hypothesis that, due to living in stick frame houses, a large part of the American population might be suffering from a low dose chronic mold intoxication which shows up as a heightened state of inflammation.
> 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
... 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.
It's funny that people born here don't know about it and I, an European buying a house and asking the workers that came for some initial renovations, found out. The wall guy said he often finds small amounts of mold when he's called to replace drywalls, but owners don't like to be told about it.
I am from The Netherlands. Buildings from 19th century and before are incredibly rare. Maybe 1% of the total housing stock. Thanks to bombings in WWII and a rapidly growing population since.
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.
I'm from Italy and buildings from the 19th century are pretty common at the center of the cities. They were rich people's residences and have massively thick walls that make them very comfortable to live in, both because of thermal mass and acoustic isolation. They're mostly used for commercial purpose now, as they're in high demand as office space for lawyers, medical practices. Only rich people can afford living there (in the upper floors).
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.
> cannot fathom why we would ever build houses from trees instead of reinforced concrete
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 deep southeast has the advantage of being one of the few regions in the US without a known major earthquake risk. It makes a lot of sense to use concrete there given the other natural hazards.
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.
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
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 ;-)
Saving 1% of your home value for repairs is actually the guideline set by the Dutch government. For HOAs there is even a legal mandate that they must set aside 0.5% of the rebuild value every year, but most decide on 1% to 2%.
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 materials used in US house construction are practically restricted by a requirement to survive extreme seismic and wind loading. In the US there are ghost towns where brick and masonry cities were completely obliterated by these hazards. As the US learned how to engineer buildings that mitigated these risks, these learnings were reflected in construction standards.
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.
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.
My home, built in 2011, has 36 ethernet ports throughout the house. Some in closets, some above the trim, some where a TV would be mounted. The TV mount areas also have conduit specifically for HDMI and other cords. And there's speakers and speaker wire going all over the house. All of it terminates in the garage at a single panel.
It's mostly unused. I have PoE wifi access points around the house. And the sound system I hardly use.
I left the building trade in the UK about 20 years ago.
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.
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.
Ceramic tiles only last until a worker goes on the roof and breaks one. In the US, contractors routinely require you to release them from liability of any damage to ceramic tile shingles. Pest fumigation becomes much more of a pain.
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.
> They're happy until the long-term effects hit them, as stick frame houses need repairs a lot more often.
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.
The average quality of construction, due to use of low skill workers, is very bad. That's been my experience living and owning houses in Canada and the US.
Newer houses can have issues with mold if the HVAC is not designed or operated correctly due to the building envelope being wrapped in a vapor barrier, trapping moisture inside. Most of the housing stock is not from this time period, older houses do not have vapor barriers so they breathe a lot better.
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.
My main point is that modern European houses, if well built, don't need maintenance at all. The expectation if you buy a new house or renovate one, is that you won't have to do any maintenance beyond cleaning the roof gutters, for your lifetime (50 years). No siding to repaint or repair, no roof repairs, no sump pump, if there's a basement (likely not) it's fully built in cement on the sides as well.
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.
Concrete or brick buildings are effectively illegal in much of the US because they aren’t safe. Large parts of the US are prone to earthquakes far more severe than any in Europe, a fact learned the hard way. It destroyed all of the prior masonry and brick buildings in the US so that type of construction is no longer allowed. Your choices are pretty much wood-frame or steel-frame construction.
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.
Very interesting perspective, thanks. One of the other comments mentioned that in Tokyo they heavily use concrete blocks. Not sure how accurate that is but how does their approach differ to the US?
It’s mostly about economics and the construction industry. You can make reinforced concrete houses to California standards but >95% of the industry is geared towards stick frame construction and it’ll be quite a bit more expensive. Commercial and large apartment buildings are often made using concrete, because they can amortize the extra costs (and except for 1x4s, the only other option is steel frame).
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.
Not concrete blocks but steel-reinforced concrete. Just about anything will survive an earthquake with enough steel in it. This becomes expensive when building to an extreme seismic standard due to the amount of materials and labor involved.
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.
Actually apartment buildings are mostly concrete. Strip away finishings like cabinets, drywall and flooring from a unit, and what's left is a concrete cell. Sometimes separating walls within a unit are wood based but that's rare too.
Basically every apartment building built in the last 25-30 years that is 6 stories or less (which is the vast majority of units constructed) will be a concrete base floor and then stick built apartments on top.
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.
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 think you and OP just have different definitions for "apartment building".
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.
Yeah I was thinking mainly of condo towers in cities, which I normally associate with apartment buildings. California has different rules due to high earthquake frequency. It's hard to generalize elsewhere.
Didn't know those had a name but that only applies to half the wood frame buildings I lived in. The other ones had no "1" (I assume the foundation/slab was concrete though).
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.
The drywall wall is stronger, heavier thicker stuff and sometimes doubled up. We also often use steel work as the studs (particularly good professionals) as it’s stronger and faster than wood to put up. Then all the wiring is in conduits, and it’s acceptable to put water feeds on the outside of walls in the room for servicing. Then it comes to our bathrooms which are proper wet rooms and usually built to a very high standard to meet insurance needs.
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.
Running conduit for electrical wiring in a house is a huge waste of labor and material. PVC insulation and a nylon jacket is just fine for 2.5mm^2 (#14AWG) conductors, which is what 90% of the wiring in a house will be.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Noise barriers are incredibly cheap. They're a tiny fraction of the cost of putting up a drywall or plaster wall. Codes say how far apart the studs should be, so you just buy a roll of batting, and unroll it into the gap between the two walls. You have to cut it to fit, but that's not a big deal.
It costs a few thousand bucks to do a whole house (during construction), even in areas with high labor costs. You can usually tack it on to the cost of insulating the exterior walls (which is basically the same process, but with a more expensive material).
Nobody does it. Not even supposedly "luxury condos". And that's assuming it's really that cheap, which it isn't because to be effective, one needs to stop all sound transmission, not just for walls, but floors too, as well as interrupting the noise transmitted through the house's wooden structure. It's quite expensive.
Why wouldn't I want to stop the noise of my neighbour's lawn mower, or the garbage truck very slowly passing by at 7:30 when I should be sound asleep, or the washing machine furiously spinning, or my visiting inlaws cooking in the kitchen when I want to get an afternoon nap ? These sh*tty houses let all noises through.
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.
Everything costs money. It's not like drywall doesn't allow you to soundproof, 2x layers of 5/8" is a common method as well as staggering 2x4's in a 2x6 wall.
My house is plastered, and it is substantially more soundproofed than drywalled houses in the neighborhood. It is not a function of the construction method, since my house is stick framed just like my neighbors.
Possibly the solution would be to have some kind of soundproofing backing material on the converse side of the drywall panels. Including this could be required by regulation which would be easier to enforce than some kind of abstract acoustic property. One of the interesting arguments that Brian Potter made is that you're usually better off trying to move the issue from construction to manufacturing.
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.
> 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.
Modern plaster has the same properties, and works well with stud finders.
On a related note, if you can find a strong rare earth magnet, you can use it as a stud finder. It'll be attracted to the nails used to hold up the drywall / plaster backer boards. They sell purpose built ones with felt backs + built in bubble levels if you want to get fancy.
> 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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
> 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.
If I ever get to build a house I’m using that high density drywall they have in hospitals everywhere but the ceiling. It doesn’t cost that much more compared to the labor and it would be enormously satisfying to know your walls can’t be easily dented or damaged.
Drywall is pretty amazing, but I don't agree with all the points in the article.
It cheap to buy and cheap to install, easy to cut and installs fast. It's tolerant with imperfect walls and is surprisingly flexible. It can also be seamlessly repaired.
It can also act as a primary air barrier.
I do not like moisture resistant drywall, moisture control is more important as well as using proper materials in high humidity areas.
I stayed with a guy in France who had an old house with these picture rail things, and it was the first time I had come across something like that. I thought it was a very interesting solution for quickly rearranging artwork in your home if you love art but don't have enough wall space to display all your pieces so you might occasionally swap them.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
Works In Progress have an odd antipathy to picture rails. Actually, picture rails are good. You don't have to fill any holes if you wish to move or remove a picture. To put up a picture rail, you can drill multiple holes laterally until you find a stud. The unused holes will be covered by the rail.
> 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."
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.
Looks like it's improved even further - I'm seeing that model listed with 512x384 resolution, and it's $300 on Amazon.
Pretty incredible! I felt like I was getting an amazing deal when I paid about $1000 15 years ago for a FLIR E4 that I could flash into an E8. I might finally retire that in favour of one of these.
I would be amused if the actual reason for upscaling is that a 256x192 display is hard to source and that the firmware is partially shared between models with a display and models without one.
It connects to a cell phone for display so the image is scaled either way. The issue is how the chosen algorithm may be adding non-existent detail or not. If you disable the enhancement you get nearest-neighbor. The true sensor size is all that really matters. Flir has nothing in this segment that comes close to that.
I am also a fortunate owner of a 100+ year old home. Why is the lath and plaster so susceptible to cracking?! That is my nemesis. I haven’t tried to hang a TV though yet.
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.
In theory, I'd rather get at something through an access panel than via cutting and patching drywall, but practically speaking, you're right: it's rare to have to open a wall, and an access panel that isn't specifically for something you need to access regularly is just a nice-to-have, and not even necessarily all that useful unless it provides the access you actually need at the time.
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.
If we ever build another house, it's going to be attic-free with exposed conduits + hvac ducts / pipes on the ceiling. Every electrical box is going to have a 2" conduit (embedded in the wall) running up to a conduit that runs on the ceiling (if there's a basement, then down to the basement ceiling).
This would let us avoid stapling electrical lines + network cables to studs inside walls. Fixing shorts, adding circuits and upgrading network lines would be trivial.
We'd have to buy what, 1000' of conduit? There's no way that's a sufficient fraction of the cost of a house.
In Chicago, code requires EMT for all electrical, which can be annoying for adding a new run, but at the very least it makes it less likely for rodents to chew through or other interference.
After wiring my whole house with Ethernet and ceiling speakers, and now dealing with a couple leaky pipes and several problems from previous owners, I'm considering ways to make these things easily accessible/replaceable while keeping an eye toward aesthetics.
For nearly a decade, Chicago does allow MC cable in a number of circumstances, basically up to 25 feet branches where you don’t want to open up a wall.
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.
My house is 150 years old, but it's also been rebuilt several times in that time. My neighbors' houses are less than a decade old. We have all swapped stories about replacing things behind drywall. Leaks. Electrical issues. Ducts. Everything. Consider yourself lucky if you have not. 50 years is not the number you should bet upon.
So outside of a few notable examples, the materials rarely fail, galvanized duct work should easily last half a century in a properly installed and maintained system, properly installed copper pipe or PEX and even (C)PVC, properly installed NM or wiring in conduit where code requires, where people get into trouble is with shoddy builders and the housing market often causes those to forgo proper inspections and it is ultimately a “market for lemons”. But blaming drywall seems a bit misplaced, since shoddy building in targeting cost only, they’re going to be the last ones replacing drywall with something fancy and expensive.
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.
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.
Because drywall is cheap, incredibly tolerant of movement and irregularities. It's also super easy to repair. It can also act as an air barrier for energy efficiency. A drop ceiling is terrible for that and is ugly AND expensive.
If I ever have a house built to my own specs, I want to get the best of both worlds by using drywall, but with most/all of the interior walls being maintenance corridors accessible via concealed doorways. A modern version of the way the dormitory in Real Genius was constructed.
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?
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.
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.
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.
It's legal and done quite often in industrial installations - look around the next time the lights are up at your favorite restaurant, for example.
It is more expensive, by more than you'd think, and so it's rarely done.
It also allows all of the trades save the drywaller/painter to be rough and tumble with what they're doing; it doesn't have to look nice behind the walls.
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?
This is different—the cost of plastic goes up if fossil fuel consumption goes down because currently it uses a waste stream. Not sure if it’s true, but it’s different than my prior intuition about fossil fuel and plastic.
Exactly - a common understanding of fossil fuels is that we could just "use them for planes and plastics" but there would be an unexpected cost there - because the plastics are basically "free" waste products of processing for other needs.
It's similar to how car heaters work on waste heat from ICE and have to be accounted for in electric cars.
[flagged]
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...
Coal is expensive, but it's still cheaper than nuke and peaker thermal. If you want power fast and your state and federal government aren't worried about a few pesky environmental regulations you might see coal come back. Part of coals attraction is that it takes a lot of people to run a coal plant, and people need jobs. Those people vote and politicians like votes.
Then you would plunk down a gas turbine like everyone else. It's so much cheaper than coal to operate and uses mostly the same high capex / long-lead machinery. I could see the jobs program angle, but these are shitty jobs. It's not like working in an air conditioned mcdonald's. Workers die in mines a lot and when they don't they live shorter, less comfortable lives with disease.
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.
Modern coal mining isn't that bad of a gig, especially surface mining (which a lot of coal is). I would certainly rather make a decent middle class wage hauling coal and support my family than work in an 'Air conditioned mcdonalds' and barely subsist in poverty.
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.
Gas turbines require infrastructure the may not exist in the area yet, and significant capital outlays.
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.
Isn't the entire coal industry like 50,000 jobs? I've never seen such a small industry so specially treated.
Coal, the most expensive energy source?
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.
Batteries make that less true today than in the past. Solar/wind + batteries are becoming cost-competitive with coal for energy on most days (24x7).
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.
Solar is cheap and abundant during daytime. It has zero power at night. Coal/gas/nukes are more expensive, but runs 24/7. Batteries are getting cheaper, but are still not that cheap.
AI/Data centers need power 24/7.
Yes so use the cheaper methane gas turbine combined cycle power plant. Coal can't compete with higher efficiency, cheaper fuel options.
In areas where there are gas transmission lines, sure. Large portions of the country don’t have that infrastructure built out yet, but do have rail lines which provide coal.
It’s also a timing/capital issue.
It will change eventually, but in the meantime people need their kWh.
Rail lines also provides logistics for methane, which produces many more usable joules per kg of fuel.
I’ve never seem any analysis of feasibility for LNG (probably what you’re referring too) vs pipeline NG for things like power plants. Do we even have sufficient liquifaction facilities for that type of volume? When I hear of that kind of thing, it’s almost always liquifying for export to places like Europe.
Batteries exist and are already deployed, with solar-plus-battery being cheaper than coal.
> 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.
We have exactly what you want - it's called shiplap or car siding.
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.
> 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.
Having owned a couple European houses they’re horrible to alter and mediocre on energy. I miss nice adaptable wood structures. Bizarrely Europeans seem to think their cinderblock homes are nicer…
I've never wanted to adapt a house that significantly. But yeah, I much prefer the cinderblock homes and miss them. Something about the wood and drywall houses just feels incredibly cheap, and I don't like the aesthetic (de gustibus et coloribus..)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Little_Pigs
Houses change over time. A house could have been build in 1920 without a toilet or central heating. Then over time it got a fireplace on the second floor, an indoor toilet, indoor bathroom, then central heating with gas, extra insulation, a couple decades later double paned windows, hybrid heating with a heat pump, then full electric heating, underfloor heating, solar panels, home battery.
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.
What you call "carving out" concrete or brick is not a big deal. You hire workers that will do it, period.
Ultimately houses are built in the way that works for the region they're built in.
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...
It's not the unavailability of trees. European countries have wisely decides that cities built of wooden houses are prone to massive fires. USians haven't learned that lesson and the Los Angeles fire isn't going to be the last one.
A yes, the wise Europeans like the Dutch who have homes in Amsterdam that are sinking into the ground due to rotting wooden beams sinking in swamp ground and homes in Groningen with cracks all over due to the earthquakes that came with pumping gas out of the ground.
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.
[flagged]
To each their own I guess. I’ll happily move walls, add or remove a bathroom, add windows, etc.
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.
> To each their own I guess. I’ll happily move walls, add or remove a bathroom, add windows, etc.
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.
>European standards mandate passing all wiring through corrugated tubes.
Incorrect. It's usually done, because it's a good idea, but nobody says you have to.
There are residential jurisdictions within USA that require metal conduit between jboxes (e.g. Chicagoland) — initially more expensive, but much easier to modify/update. Flexible plastic conduit doesn't seem to offer barely any more protection than a standard US NM sheathed cable.
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).
The main usefulness of plastic conduits is not protection, but being able to pass new wires without opening the walls.
Maybe in your country. In Italy it's illegal not to use appropriate corrugated tubes.
Bribery and tax fraud is also illegal in Italy but that didn't stop Berlusconi.
[flagged]
That means everything in your house is literally set in stone. Sometimes people want to redecorate, have plumbing in a different location or a TV on a different wall.
Sometimes people want stupid things. It's not difficult to hire masons that will redo internal walls. It's just a bit more expensive.
My father grew up in a home without central heating or an indoor toilet. Last time that home was listed on the market it had underfloor heating, two bathrooms, triple paned glass, an extension on the roof and various other modern amenities. Times change, houses should too. We are not longer pooping in an outhouse anymore.
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".
[flagged]
Eh, people have a terrible time renovating or adding anything in housing in Europe. A lot of construction doesn’t have those tubes.
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's not any different from having to renovate a 40's house in the US. You'll have to redo all the plumbing and electrical system to current code. Corrugated tubes have been common since the 90s and mandatory shortly thereafter.
Most European housing is made of concrete, stone, or brick.
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.
To properly redo an old house, you'll have to redo the siding and probably the roof too.
Yes, if they weren’t redone separately. Each of them has their own lifecycles, so it’s rare they all get done at once.
At that point, most people will just do a full teardown.
A properly built house doesn't need a teardown for centuries.
‘Need’ vs ‘if you’re going to redo literally everything, why not make it more modern’.
> 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.
My dad, who has been a carpenter for over 50 years used to rail against boxing in pipes.
"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
"glue and screw" is the norm now. I just can't - having struggled to remove glued down stuff.
Interesting comment with worthwhile content, but the writing style strongly smells of ChatGPT, and the phrase "For someone in your position" is incongruous (who is being addressed?). Did you use it, and if so, would you mind sharing the prompt?
They're a founder of a startup doing this kind of thing, realistically they probably copied blurb per-prepared marketing blurb or something they sent to someone else.
“Terrestrial develops a robotic approach to earthen construction”. person you replied to claims to be a founder of this company, according to LinkedIn
Other “tells” in the comment are the subscript “2” and the full spelling of the chemical. Also 3 emdashes
yeah, so the turn in EU towards renewable energy is driving fwd the business of earthen construction. our core (validated) product is printing earthen acoustic barriers at ~4-5m3/hr. panels from loam are a great alternative to gypsum; due to the hygrothermic characteristics of earth the moisture content is stabilised (constant in a ~50-55% bandwidth) which is a massive advantage in view of traditional materials. and fully circular. I'm a developer of pythonocc and tesseract-nanobind, and take pleasure in augmenting my thinking with a dash of ai.
I use subscript 2s and emdashes. Your "tells" seem to be based on the assumption that humans will not bother to learn key combinations.
There are 4 paragraphs and three of them have emdashes. You may use emdashes, but you use them orders of magnitude less frequently than current AI models.
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.
I was just wondering where our gypsum came from, I always assumed it was mined. Thank you for the information.
Question: Would this process of creating synthethic gypsum leave any toxic chemicals from the scrubbing process at the coal power plant exhaust?
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.
We've had great luck with the removable 3M velcro picture hangers. (Each corner is held with two pieces of velcro that face each other. The velcro has double back tape on the back, which affixes to the wall and the picture. The double back tape is stretchy, and can be removed by pulling a tab. The tape is single use.
No damage to paint so far, though we've only had them on the walls for about a year.
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.
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 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. Not sure how long they’ll last but there hasn’t been any push to replace them.
Have you ever done a mold spore count in your house ? There's a hypothesis that, due to living in stick frame houses, a large part of the American population might be suffering from a low dose chronic mold intoxication which shows up as a heightened state of inflammation.
> 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.
In places like Boston there are many 100+ years old stick frame houses. They hold up just fine. Properly built wooden houses don't get any mold.
Very few are properly built, especially in the last decades. Asymptotically to zero.
I have many friends who own houses built in the last 10 to 30 years ago. None of them have any issues with mold.
> None of them have any issues with mold.
... 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.
Even growing on the walls most people ignore it…
I have family like this.
Prolific recent media example: JK Rowling.
Hold up ≠ remain a healthy place to breathe.
ChangeTheAirFoundation.org
It's funny that people born here don't know about it and I, an European buying a house and asking the workers that came for some initial renovations, found out. The wall guy said he often finds small amounts of mold when he's called to replace drywalls, but owners don't like to be told about it.
100 years is nothing! I mean my local pub, for many years, was built in the 17th century.
This is probably one of the European vs. American divides though.
I am from The Netherlands. Buildings from 19th century and before are incredibly rare. Maybe 1% of the total housing stock. Thanks to bombings in WWII and a rapidly growing population since.
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.
I'm from Italy and buildings from the 19th century are pretty common at the center of the cities. They were rich people's residences and have massively thick walls that make them very comfortable to live in, both because of thermal mass and acoustic isolation. They're mostly used for commercial purpose now, as they're in high demand as office space for lawyers, medical practices. Only rich people can afford living there (in the upper floors).
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.
I seriously doubt you get sufficiently more earthquakes than, say, Tokio, which is mostly concrete
Christchurch would give it a run for its money. It’s down to every few days now but it was almost by the minute for a while there.
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...
https://www.christchurchquakemap.co.nz/february
> cannot fathom why we would ever build houses from trees instead of reinforced concrete
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 deep southeast has the advantage of being one of the few regions in the US without a known major earthquake risk. It makes a lot of sense to use concrete there given the other natural hazards.
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.
> doesn't it rot?!!
It does indeed.
There’s a portion of our populace who accepts waking up tired with flu-like symptoms daily.
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.
Which is ofc complete nonsense.
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 ;-)
Saving 1% of your home value for repairs is actually the guideline set by the Dutch government. For HOAs there is even a legal mandate that they must set aside 0.5% of the rebuild value every year, but most decide on 1% to 2%.
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.
I completely agree, I felt the same. It's a cultural thing. But its almost funny once you've broaden your horizon.
The materials used in US house construction are practically restricted by a requirement to survive extreme seismic and wind loading. In the US there are ghost towns where brick and masonry cities were completely obliterated by these hazards. As the US learned how to engineer buildings that mitigated these risks, these learnings were reflected in construction standards.
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.
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.
My home, built in 2011, has 36 ethernet ports throughout the house. Some in closets, some above the trim, some where a TV would be mounted. The TV mount areas also have conduit specifically for HDMI and other cords. And there's speakers and speaker wire going all over the house. All of it terminates in the garage at a single panel.
It's mostly unused. I have PoE wifi access points around the house. And the sound system I hardly use.
I left the building trade in the UK about 20 years ago.
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.
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.
Ceramic tiles only last until a worker goes on the roof and breaks one. In the US, contractors routinely require you to release them from liability of any damage to ceramic tile shingles. Pest fumigation becomes much more of a pain.
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.
In a properly designed house there's almost never any need for a contractor to walk on the roof. Attics are fully insulated and are habitable, etc...
> They're happy until the long-term effects hit them, as stick frame houses need repairs a lot more often.
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.
The average quality of construction, due to use of low skill workers, is very bad. That's been my experience living and owning houses in Canada and the US.
Newer houses can have issues with mold if the HVAC is not designed or operated correctly due to the building envelope being wrapped in a vapor barrier, trapping moisture inside. Most of the housing stock is not from this time period, older houses do not have vapor barriers so they breathe a lot better.
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.
My main point is that modern European houses, if well built, don't need maintenance at all. The expectation if you buy a new house or renovate one, is that you won't have to do any maintenance beyond cleaning the roof gutters, for your lifetime (50 years). No siding to repaint or repair, no roof repairs, no sump pump, if there's a basement (likely not) it's fully built in cement on the sides as well.
> Nowadays, European companies have developed many modular building techniques
It's so fun watching Europeans reinvent the Soviet approach to building that they used to mock and shit on
We shat on it (and still do) because of how badly designed and executed they were. Appalling quite and zero adherence to any norms or standards.
Any source? Because there were definitely norms and standards for buildings in the USSR
Ehhh I don’t know if this is really that true. Beyond painting the exterior it’s not like a stick frame is requiring constant rebuilding.
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.
When it rained into the interior wood frame of the home before they were done building it, did any Germans happen to stop by to explain biology?
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.
Concrete or brick buildings are effectively illegal in much of the US because they aren’t safe. Large parts of the US are prone to earthquakes far more severe than any in Europe, a fact learned the hard way. It destroyed all of the prior masonry and brick buildings in the US so that type of construction is no longer allowed. Your choices are pretty much wood-frame or steel-frame construction.
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.
Very interesting perspective, thanks. One of the other comments mentioned that in Tokyo they heavily use concrete blocks. Not sure how accurate that is but how does their approach differ to the US?
Not concrete blocks, reinforced concrete. There is a major difference. Tokyo is mostly high rises.
It’s also quite expensive.
Normal Japanese construction has always been wood frame.
It’s mostly about economics and the construction industry. You can make reinforced concrete houses to California standards but >95% of the industry is geared towards stick frame construction and it’ll be quite a bit more expensive. Commercial and large apartment buildings are often made using concrete, because they can amortize the extra costs (and except for 1x4s, the only other option is steel frame).
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.
Not concrete blocks but steel-reinforced concrete. Just about anything will survive an earthquake with enough steel in it. This becomes expensive when building to an extreme seismic standard due to the amount of materials and labor involved.
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.
Wood isn't flimsy. Drywall is fine, it's cheap and easy to repair. If built correctly can last 100+ years.
Actually apartment buildings are mostly concrete. Strip away finishings like cabinets, drywall and flooring from a unit, and what's left is a concrete cell. Sometimes separating walls within a unit are wood based but that's rare too.
Basically every apartment building built in the last 25-30 years that is 6 stories or less (which is the vast majority of units constructed) will be a concrete base floor and then stick built apartments on top.
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.
I think you and OP just have different definitions for "apartment building".
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.
Yeah I was thinking mainly of condo towers in cities, which I normally associate with apartment buildings. California has different rules due to high earthquake frequency. It's hard to generalize elsewhere.
AKA the 5-over-1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5-over-1
Didn't know those had a name but that only applies to half the wood frame buildings I lived in. The other ones had no "1" (I assume the foundation/slab was concrete though).
[dead]
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
The drywall wall is stronger, heavier thicker stuff and sometimes doubled up. We also often use steel work as the studs (particularly good professionals) as it’s stronger and faster than wood to put up. Then all the wiring is in conduits, and it’s acceptable to put water feeds on the outside of walls in the room for servicing. Then it comes to our bathrooms which are proper wet rooms and usually built to a very high standard to meet insurance needs.
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.
Running conduit for electrical wiring in a house is a huge waste of labor and material. PVC insulation and a nylon jacket is just fine for 2.5mm^2 (#14AWG) conductors, which is what 90% of the wiring in a house will be.
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 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.
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.
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.
[dead]
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.
Noise barriers are incredibly cheap. They're a tiny fraction of the cost of putting up a drywall or plaster wall. Codes say how far apart the studs should be, so you just buy a roll of batting, and unroll it into the gap between the two walls. You have to cut it to fit, but that's not a big deal.
It costs a few thousand bucks to do a whole house (during construction), even in areas with high labor costs. You can usually tack it on to the cost of insulating the exterior walls (which is basically the same process, but with a more expensive material).
Nobody does it. Not even supposedly "luxury condos". And that's assuming it's really that cheap, which it isn't because to be effective, one needs to stop all sound transmission, not just for walls, but floors too, as well as interrupting the noise transmitted through the house's wooden structure. It's quite expensive.
> one needs to stop all sound transmission
One does not need to stop all sound transmission.
Why wouldn't I want to stop the noise of my neighbour's lawn mower, or the garbage truck very slowly passing by at 7:30 when I should be sound asleep, or the washing machine furiously spinning, or my visiting inlaws cooking in the kitchen when I want to get an afternoon nap ? These sh*tty houses let all noises through.
Off-Topic, but not really: Mack’s Ultra Soft earplugs
I'd rather not. I expect more from a modern house.
I identify with that frustration more than most!
But, how many additional decades will you expect it for,
without giving your nervous system the rest it’s asking you for?
My plan is threefold:
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.
Thanks! :]
Everything costs money. It's not like drywall doesn't allow you to soundproof, 2x layers of 5/8" is a common method as well as staggering 2x4's in a 2x6 wall.
It's not just the drywall, for comfort you need to soundproof the floors and the structure as well.
My house is plastered, and it is substantially more soundproofed than drywalled houses in the neighborhood. It is not a function of the construction method, since my house is stick framed just like my neighbors.
Possibly the solution would be to have some kind of soundproofing backing material on the converse side of the drywall panels. Including this could be required by regulation which would be easier to enforce than some kind of abstract acoustic property. One of the interesting arguments that Brian Potter made is that you're usually better off trying to move the issue from construction to manufacturing.
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.
> 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.
Modern plaster has the same properties, and works well with stud finders.
On a related note, if you can find a strong rare earth magnet, you can use it as a stud finder. It'll be attracted to the nails used to hold up the drywall / plaster backer boards. They sell purpose built ones with felt backs + built in bubble levels if you want to get fancy.
Very yikes.
Also wrong:
> By eschewing the lath lattices, buildings now have way more room in wall cavities for improved insulation and conduits
The cavities are exactly the same size, plaster+lath, or drywall.
Most residential construction won't use conduit anywhere, and commercial construction would never bury a conduit inside a wall, regardless of wall covering.
These are weird things to get wrong.
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.
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.
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).
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.
If you're interested in this kind of material, I'd recommend checking out Construction Physics by Brian Potter.
https://www.construction-physics.com
Yes and it's often posted on hn: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=construction-physics....
> 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.
If I ever get to build a house I’m using that high density drywall they have in hospitals everywhere but the ceiling. It doesn’t cost that much more compared to the labor and it would be enormously satisfying to know your walls can’t be easily dented or damaged.
Drywall is pretty amazing, but I don't agree with all the points in the article.
It cheap to buy and cheap to install, easy to cut and installs fast. It's tolerant with imperfect walls and is surprisingly flexible. It can also be seamlessly repaired.
It can also act as a primary air barrier.
I do not like moisture resistant drywall, moisture control is more important as well as using proper materials in high humidity areas.
One thing I know for sure - this thing benefits mainly builders and renovators, not end users.
I stayed with a guy in France who had an old house with these picture rail things, and it was the first time I had come across something like that. I thought it was a very interesting solution for quickly rearranging artwork in your home if you love art but don't have enough wall space to display all your pieces so you might occasionally swap them.
Drywall is terrible vs. modern plaster.
Modern plaster has backing boards that are similar to drywall, so you get most of the construction advantages (except for the labor intensive step of plastering), and can hand pictures / toggle bolts in the same way. Unlike plaster, drywall gets moldy + needs to be replaced after water damage. I think this is why films with old buildings set in Europe often show peeling paint / water damaged plaster, but people are still living in them, and it seems fine. In the US, buildings with that level of wear would be so moldy they'd need to be gutted to studs, at minimum.
The article touches on mold resistant drywall, but I'll believe it when I see it. Also, apparently, it is much easier to create long-lasting patches for plaster than drywall.
It's more important to control moisture than buy moisture resistant materials.
Drywall is great, its cheap and easy to repair.
I would not want to live in any water damaged house without remediation due to the risk of mold.
> In the US, buildings with that level of wear would be so moldy they'd need to be gutted to studs, at minimum.
Middle America and the rust belt would like a word (and the word is: mycotoxins, lol).
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.
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.
"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.
Works In Progress have an odd antipathy to picture rails. Actually, picture rails are good. You don't have to fill any holes if you wish to move or remove a picture. To put up a picture rail, you can drill multiple holes laterally until you find a stud. The unused holes will be covered by the rail.
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.
I was just reading how it's common to pulverize gypsum drywall to mix into dense clay soils to loosen it up.
What about cement render? Seems like plaster board and plastering was only mentioned.
I am sure plastering was common in 80s too but maybe misremembering.
edit: seen other comments and that was/is "modern plastering" i.e. with backing boards.
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.
Thermal Master P3: 25fps, 256x192, manual focus
Looks like it's improved even further - I'm seeing that model listed with 512x384 resolution, and it's $300 on Amazon.
Pretty incredible! I felt like I was getting an amazing deal when I paid about $1000 15 years ago for a FLIR E4 that I could flash into an E8. I might finally retire that in favour of one of these.
That's the software upscaled size, not the real resolution. Typical distortions of East Asian marketing.
I would be amused if the actual reason for upscaling is that a 256x192 display is hard to source and that the firmware is partially shared between models with a display and models without one.
It connects to a cell phone for display so the image is scaled either way. The issue is how the chosen algorithm may be adding non-existent detail or not. If you disable the enhancement you get nearest-neighbor. The true sensor size is all that really matters. Flir has nothing in this segment that comes close to that.
Pretty much but the wall is mostly lathe so you usually hit first go.
I am also a fortunate owner of a 100+ year old home. Why is the lath and plaster so susceptible to cracking?! That is my nemesis. I haven’t tried to hang a TV though yet.
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.
In theory, I'd rather get at something through an access panel than via cutting and patching drywall, but practically speaking, you're right: it's rare to have to open a wall, and an access panel that isn't specifically for something you need to access regularly is just a nice-to-have, and not even necessarily all that useful unless it provides the access you actually need at the time.
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.
If we ever build another house, it's going to be attic-free with exposed conduits + hvac ducts / pipes on the ceiling. Every electrical box is going to have a 2" conduit (embedded in the wall) running up to a conduit that runs on the ceiling (if there's a basement, then down to the basement ceiling).
This would let us avoid stapling electrical lines + network cables to studs inside walls. Fixing shorts, adding circuits and upgrading network lines would be trivial.
We'd have to buy what, 1000' of conduit? There's no way that's a sufficient fraction of the cost of a house.
In Chicago, code requires EMT for all electrical, which can be annoying for adding a new run, but at the very least it makes it less likely for rodents to chew through or other interference.
After wiring my whole house with Ethernet and ceiling speakers, and now dealing with a couple leaky pipes and several problems from previous owners, I'm considering ways to make these things easily accessible/replaceable while keeping an eye toward aesthetics.
For nearly a decade, Chicago does allow MC cable in a number of circumstances, basically up to 25 feet branches where you don’t want to open up a wall.
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.
My house is 150 years old, but it's also been rebuilt several times in that time. My neighbors' houses are less than a decade old. We have all swapped stories about replacing things behind drywall. Leaks. Electrical issues. Ducts. Everything. Consider yourself lucky if you have not. 50 years is not the number you should bet upon.
So outside of a few notable examples, the materials rarely fail, galvanized duct work should easily last half a century in a properly installed and maintained system, properly installed copper pipe or PEX and even (C)PVC, properly installed NM or wiring in conduit where code requires, where people get into trouble is with shoddy builders and the housing market often causes those to forgo proper inspections and it is ultimately a “market for lemons”. But blaming drywall seems a bit misplaced, since shoddy building in targeting cost only, they’re going to be the last ones replacing drywall with something fancy and expensive.
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.
Rodents love PEX. If we knew, we'd have used copper. It would have been cheaper in the long run.
It just takes one rat.
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.
No, Uponor AquaPEX.
(C)PVC gets brittle and can crack. Been there done that.
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.
Because drywall is cheap, incredibly tolerant of movement and irregularities. It's also super easy to repair. It can also act as an air barrier for energy efficiency. A drop ceiling is terrible for that and is ugly AND expensive.
If I ever have a house built to my own specs, I want to get the best of both worlds by using drywall, but with most/all of the interior walls being maintenance corridors accessible via concealed doorways. A modern version of the way the dormitory in Real Genius was constructed.
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?
If you think the drywall access situation is bad, don't start working on your cars.
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?
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.
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.
It's legal and done quite often in industrial installations - look around the next time the lights are up at your favorite restaurant, for example.
It is more expensive, by more than you'd think, and so it's rarely done.
It also allows all of the trades save the drywaller/painter to be rough and tumble with what they're doing; it doesn't have to look nice behind the walls.
“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.
> The popular additive was asbestos. While today we all know about its intense toxicity
Asbestos is not toxic. The mechanism by which it fucks up your lungs is completely different.
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.