[enobrev]

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?

[MarkMarine]

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

[alanbernstein]

It's the repainting that bothers me

[kmoser]

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.

[MarkMarine]

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.

[kmoser]

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.

[asdff]

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.

[mlyle]

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.

[enobrev]

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.

[nostrademons]

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.

[Fwirt]

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.

[mlyle]

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.

[XorNot]

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.

[mlyle]

Odds are you are compromising the fire safety of your residence by doing this.

[hedora]

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.

[enobrev]

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.

[epcoa]

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.

[epcoa]

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.

[AngryData]

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.

[enobrev]

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.

[epcoa]

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.

[hedora]

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.

[badc0ffee]

Maybe you're thinking of poly-B, not PEX.

[rootusrootus]

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.

[epcoa]

No, Uponor AquaPEX.

[SoftTalker]

(C)PVC gets brittle and can crack. Been there done that.

[kevin_thibedeau]

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.

[mrexroad]

it's pretty cool how the paper faces effectively provide all the strength by creating a torsion box w/ the gypsum in the middle.

[accrual]

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.

[enobrev]

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.

[moduspol]

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.

[turtlebits]

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.

[asdff]

If you think the drywall access situation is bad, don't start working on your cars.

[blincoln]

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?

[dathanb82]

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.

[valleyer]

No -- use doors.

[asdff]

So a bunch of doors everywhere you don't open for potentially 100 years?

[grebc]

Cheaper than building them behind concrete or brick.

[esseph]

I think the question is: why are they behind anything to begin with?

Conduit all the things and paint to match?

[globular-toast]

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.

[accrual]

This is essentially what some industrial-style lofts do.

[grebc]

Probably not legal.

[Fwirt]

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.

[grebc]

You don’t need to explain that to me.

[bombcar]

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.