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The wonder of modern drywall

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Re: The wonder of modern drywall

#61

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

asdff wrote: post #33

> 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…

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.

Re: The wonder of modern drywall

#62

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

franktankbank wrote: post #55
asdff wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Re: The wonder of modern drywall

#63

Post by jccooper »

ghtbircshotbe wrote: post #50

1. Is plaster and lath gypsum based? In my experience plaster is basically identical to stucco, which is basically just mortar with increasingly fine sand. It is very hard and completely unlike drywall. 2) Why emphasize asbestos when talking about plaster? My understanding is you likely have more to worry about if you have a house from say the 40s-70s, which almost universally have some sort of drywall product.

"Plaster" can be lime, gypsum, or cement, in rough order of historical adoption. Sometimes you even use different types on the same wall; cement rough coat and lime or gypsum top coat, for example.

Re: The wonder of modern drywall

#64

Post by aaronbrethorst »

xnx wrote: post #47
aaronbrethorst wrote: post #9

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…

Do picture rails work for gallery walls (clusters of frames)?

I think so. https://www.stasgroup.com/en

Re: The wonder of modern drywall

#65

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

enobrev wrote: post #3

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?

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.

Re: The wonder of modern drywall

#66

Post by rootusrootus »

globular-toast wrote: post #30
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #12

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 st…

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, leavin…

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.

Re: The wonder of modern drywall

#67

Post by BadBadJellyBean »

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.

Re: The wonder of modern drywall

#68

Post by kogasa240p »

fractallyte wrote: post #27

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…

>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.

Re: The wonder of modern drywall

#69

Post by rootusrootus »

BadBadJellyBean wrote: post #67

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 a…

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.

Re: The wonder of modern drywall

#70

Post by rootusrootus »

littlestymaar wrote: post #31
aaronbrethorst wrote: post #9

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…

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.
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