Why drywall replaced plaster in homes. The odd original use for drywall.

I just sat and watched a whole video on the history of Sheetrock. I’m officially an old man now. 😅

My cousin lives in a 1899 Victorian. He is fortunate enough to possess all the original blueprints and bids, and contracts which is super cool. The contracts for the plaster specify how much goat hair is to be used in the plaster. Imagine that!

Very interesting video. My Dad was a plasterer. His career followed your timeline. When retired, his work was almost all remodels in Beverly Hills to match the exiting work in those beautiful old mansions there. He had distain for dry wall commenting that it was applied by "shack artists" , 😊 But even the 14 year old version of me could see that his was a dying art. In fact, one of his last projects was to come out of retirement to work on the J. Paul Getty Museum in Pacific Palisades'. Much of the fancy plaster work, (Crown Molding, Cornices and Medallions, etc.) were created by my dad. Are there people around now who can do this type of work? Not many, I'll bet.

My junior high had real plaster walls, and even as a kid I noticed the difference. If you knocked or tapped on the walls they were dead solid, without the hollow, cheap drum effect of newer buildings. The ceiling, molding, walls and corners seemed sculpted and unified in a way that drywall construction couldn't match.

I owned a 1920s house in CT. I renovated the living room and found old sheetrock with "patent pending" stamped on the inside. Also just to mention for fun, the previous owner renovated the upstairs bedroom and they must have overturned a can of paint. I found a big glob of paint sitting on the upside of the first floor ceiling. It never fully dried.

Our home (built in 1963) was finished inside using "fireproof lath". I discovered this right after we bought it in 1997 and was remodeling / updating the bathrooms. The product was 3/8" thick and came in 16" x 48" pieces applied horizontally with the joints staggered just as is now done with drywall. The applied plaster varied in thickness from about 3/8" to as much as 3/4". There was also a wire mesh embedded in all of the corners. I would say it was quite durable as there were virtually no cracks as is far too often now the case with drywall.

In 1962, when I was 15, I began working summers with my dad, who was a lather. This was in the San Jose area of California, and apartment buildings were being built all over. Carport ceilings were covered with "Rocklath," a sheetrock-type material full of holes, over which plaster was applied.

A UK perspective. Our current house has a wonderful mixture of “plaster”. The front part dates from 1760: it is traditional lathe and plaster. The lathes were made from chestnut and hand-riven not sawn. There is a great tradition of coppicing chestnut here (also in Italy and maybe other countries). Chestnut trees are initially allowed to grow maybe 20’ and then the main trunk is sawn off. The tree regrows but with multiple stems (or branches?) around the place where the main trunk was. These multiple new stems are allowed to grow for 3 or 4 years and they get up to 20 feet or so; then those stems are harvested; the stump left and more, new stems, grow. It is a rotational crop. A woodsman would have perhaps 20 copse which he looked after and, every year, he just went from one to the next as the chestnut had grown. Some of these copse are well over 100 years old and you can see the evidence of how the chestnut resiliently grows, is cut down, grow a again, cut down etc. It’s not as widely practiced as it used to be because we don’t use as many chestnut products as we used to - but it is still quite common. We have a stock fence which has chestnut stakes driven into the ground. One big use was/is that the largest and straight-est of the crop became hop poles for the huge number of hop gardens that we had in Kent. Smaller branches became sheep hurdles, garden fence hurdles, baskets, trugs- all manner of things that were used in rural UK. So , branches of chestnut, perhaps 2” in diameter, were riven with a special axe in halves or quarters when green and allowed to dry. They were then sold to the local builders. The builder had already got the building up using large oak beams, again usually hand cut with axe and adze and he then put in more vertical, smaller oak columns to provide the place onto which he could nail the wooden lathes. He could then mix up his own plaster mixture which was usually a blend of slaked lime, chalk and horse hair. Obviously the thickness of the plaster had to be quite high so that you could push the first coats through the lathes and get it keyed onto the lathes. Later coats were thinner until he got to the finish he wanted. Then, in a later part of the house, we have crude fibre board used instead of the lathes and this was again plastered over. Later still, we have what we know as plaster board which is again skimmed over with a layer perhaps 3/16”. In the barn conversion, we have a mixture. We have different grades of plasterboard for different appplicat

Our house built in 1941 had a brown coat and plaster veneer over a sheetrock like product made by US Gypsum, total thickness neatly one inch. The finish coat was like glass, you could not see a trowel mark on it. Made for a very nice, soundproof house with good thermal mass. Way better than modern drywall and a huge improvement over lathe construction.

Fascinating! 80-90% of any middle class or even lower middle class homes are either fired clay brick or concrete brick in my country, Uganda. With cement and sand plaster as the preferred veneer. Ceramic tiles are usually the floor. Richer folks may use marble, wood tiles, or terrazzo. The only wood is usually in trusses for the roofing and in the kitchen and wardrobes. Makes for excellent sound proofing.

I have worked in a few old houses, and I admire the skill of those old plasterers.

I moved to a 1860s farmhouse in Devon, UK, as a 6 year old kid in the mid 80s. All the rooms had lathe and plaster walls, including hair for binding. We know it was installed on 1899... because there was a newspaper from that year, still readable, in the gap behind one of them...👍

I live in a large brick house from 1897, and luckily, almost all the plaster walls are intact. In very few places, we have had to replace it with sheetrock, but most of the repairs have been done with the old three layer technique. Compared to sheetrock, I find that the plaster simply looks better, and it is much quieter as well. In modern homes, one can often hear everything going on next door, where as with plaster walls, very little sound come through.

Brent, I enjoyed the video however you missed one important point. Drywall lath was originally used to replace the labor intensive wood lath application and in many cases the scratch coat. It did not originally replace the brown, or leveling coat. This all-important coat is the one that allows the plasterer to build the wall out to the grounds as well as straighten and square up the wall and room through the dot and screed process to prepare for a full finish coat. I live in a 1962 ranch style builders home which has walls plastered in this way. It is very common in this area (Western Michigan) and in houses from late '40's into the '70's. Of course now virtually all houses and commercial buildings use drywall that is taped, finished and painted and the finished product is rarely as straight, square and plumb as traditional plaster would be. There are still a fair number of us traditional plasterers around (I have just over 30 years experience) who know the difference.

Just imagine going in a room and nailing a 1/4x1 strip of wood on every stud and ceiling rafter. Every 1/4" apart. Then you use gallons of plaster on three coats each wall and ceiling. It must be smooth and flat. Now you got to clean all your tools and the spills. Now either brown paper or news paper is applied. You can then paint, wallpaper or wood finish. Very time consuming and expensive. Years of experience are necessary and very special tools.

Thank you for the education, I do love my plaster walls for many reasons, one not mentioned is the ability to hang a painting on the wall anywhere I would like, one does not have to worry about finding a stud. Thank you Brent!

My 1941 house in New England has sheet rock on interior walls, covered with a uniform ½ inch of plaster layers (including a thin brown coat and a white coat 2:03). You’re 100% correct that they saw sheet rock as a replacement for the lath only (and they kept the lathers on staff to install it), and the plaster guys were the the other half of the team, so they stayed employed as well—even though today we see sheet rock as a finished product with a single installer.

You're telling me drywall was originally invented to be used for as a plaster and lathe replacement? No way, I don't buy it, you're blowing my mind over here

Interesting fact, in today's modern world, wifi signals transmit better through drywall than plaster.

I can't believe I found this amazing resource just trying to find out why drywall is used at all.