What are house walls actually made of? 

Top tip to add to this - generally the "metal studs" are used around area's with a fire danger i.e Kitchen - it's because they don't go up in flames - unlike wooden studs!

Worth mentioning lintels as well, which are a whole set of fun and games in themselves.

Great share Andy, cheers. Happy Christmas!

You keep coming up with some brilliant ideas to educate, Andy. Keep ‘em coming 🌞

I love the way how patiently and clearly you explain the points like that %)

Thanks Andy, Excellent video and a really good resource for everyone 😊

Great video, another video of the other wall materials would be great to see too.

My 1977 built house was one one the first ever built by Bloors. They did everything on the cheap, including the internal walls. These are made of plastered Strawboard. Hanging pictures is easy! Just get a self tapping screw or picture hook, whack it in half way with a hammer then either twist or screw it in the rest of the way. With no material removed from the wall it gives a really strong mount for anything that I want to hang on my internal walls. 🙂

This is great advice and information. Sadly it's a few decades of heartache and broken and burnt bits late for me but I really wish I'd know this when I started DIY renovations in my 20s. My dad used to call the old hard brick 'engineering bricks' before drilling twenty or so holes to find one that penetrated enough to hang an entire wall unit to! I still don't know much about lintels though, so if you're starting a series of things to drill into...

Great video deserves a lot more views. I subscribed

Thanks for another great practical general overview Andy, informative as always, I wish I'd had this sort of guidance available 30+ years ago rather than learning it all through experience. I shall be sharing it with my brood, although they'll probably ignore it and then ask me the exact question in a month or two ! It's difficult to cover all the relevant info in a shortish video, so I think you did a great job covering so much. I've had to deal with most of those scenarios over the years apart from that Paramount board (thank god) we did look at some starter homes in the late eighties that I wouldn't consider buying due to the thin-ness of the walls - it was probably this stuff so a good dodge there ! Bricks vary so much, my childhood home was built in the 50s and all the internal walls are brick, my Dad had terrible trouble drilling them without SDS or even a Hammer drill, sometimes had to use the old Rawlplug plugging tool and a hammer, my 1990s Hanson bricks on the other hand you can drill easily without resorting to hammer action, stable enough though !

Brilliant video (again), thank you. Especially useful for me as we live in an extended early 1900's property with a real hodge-podge of different wall types!

That was brilliant mate. Thanks 👍🏼

Informative video, thanks Andy 👍🏻👍🏻

Our 1900 Victorian End Terrace has a gable wall with a cavity but the front and back walls are solid. The load-bearing internal walls are brick, and the non-load bearing walls are lath and plaster. So like so many UK homes, we've got all sorts. Our bricks are really hard and need an SDS drill. I love my corded Bosch SDS drill. Great video Andy, really well thought out and well explained.

Interesting video Mr Mac - thanks. Have you done one on wall fixings i.e wall plugs, how to size drill bit to match and screws to match said plugs?

Hi Andy, good tips and advice on walls, my house is solid sand stone built in 1897 most stone houses around Wrexham is sand stone ,the further West you go they can be granite or slate. The internal walls in my house is brick and no cavity ,so it can be a little cold some times in the winter especially below -5c. Thanks for the video and the use of the right fixing's. As always a great video catch you soon Take care👍

Our 1999 built house is a mix of paramount board and thermalite - so fixing anything to any wall is... fun! The only positive about paramount board is it's easy to add cables to - just go in to the loft and ram a piece of conduit down through the cardboard to where it needs to be - no noggins in the way.

Here's one you never mentioned. Strammit / Strawboards. Bane of my life! Our house was a 1996 build and all internal walls (aside of integrated garage) are made up of this stuff. Fire treated and structurally good, but horrid like the Paramount style. You want to cut a section to say change a single backbox to a double, and before you know it your house looks like a barn!! Neighbour took out a couple of their walls and it was a right mess, plus they embed the 10mm rad pipes into it which is annoying to work around. Great video explainer there Andy, love it!

In my 1950's house I have clinker which is a bugger to drill because when you start drilling through the plaster it hits the block then moves off centre so you end up drilling a slot, 6 times out of 10.

Great video as always! My house was built in 1970 and most of the internal walls are paramount (didn’t know it was called that until today). Plasterboard fixings work well in it but watch the thickness. Not ideal for running cables either…

Hi Andy, thanks. My 2003 built house had no cavity insulation but the EPC when we bought 3 years ago said 'assumed'. Assume is making an 'ass of u and me'. The internal walls are metal studs but the tiles (utility room only so far) seem to be bonded to the walls and take the plasterboard off with them. The bathroom refurb is going to be some fun me thinks! Ah, the pleasures of home ownership!! Cheers, Happy Christmas to you all.

Just a point about my internal walls upstairs, which are made of three sheets of plasterboard glued together with batterns at the top and bottom. It's surprisingly sturdy but the lack of a cavity is quite challenging. I refuse to hang anything heavy off of them.

Victorian terraces in Portsea Island from about 1880 onwards were made from local bricks from the clay underlying the east of the island, as the need for housing spread from the west dockland areas of the city of Portsmouth eastwards. In Fratton and Southsea, even this early, the external walls had a 3 to 4-inch air-filled cavity, presumably to keep out the worst of the coastal weather. Mouse and rat infestations in these walls are common today. The wrought iron fishtail wall ties have mostly rusted away by now and rust expansion has led to horizontal cracks in the mortar, and need making good with modern remedial wall ties of stainless steel. Recently, 3 adjacent terraced houses in Fratton (7/12/2022, Nos. 25-29, Langford Road PO1 5RJ) collapsed when a front door was shut! It was reported that low quality bricks in the foundations were responsible for the instability. The bricks on internal walls tend to be soft, or very soft. The mortar and plaster was made with lime burnt from chalk quarried on the South Downs to the north on the mainland and was mucky and grey, and today is mostly rotten below the finish plaster. Internal and party walls were either single-thickness or double-thickness solid walls. Many walls are difficult to securely fix load-bearing supports for shelving having thick plaster and soft bricks and mortar. Many large flat-screen TVs have met their doom this way. The finish plaster and mouldings are made from higher grade plaster, and plaster of Paris. Much recent renovation has included internal cement rendering of ground floor walls for damp proofing work and dry lining or gypsum plaster finishes, as well as artexing. On exterior walls, a variety of external rendering and other finishes are in evidence. Due to wartime bombing, as the nearby Naval dockyards were a prime target, terraces often have a few post-war houses interspersed marking bombsites.

Great video. In a c.1925 house at the moment, so no cavity. Interestingly, recent work means some of the internal walls are now dot and dab.

My home is a early/mid 1900s and its a combination of solid brick and concrete, absolute hell to drill into!

9:28 OMG! I lived on this street!!!!! Aside from that shocker - brilliant video as always. Thank you

Very comprehensive. We have brick and block in our late 60s property but the blocks on the inner leaf are clay blocks with hollow air gaps inside. I think the modern version is called porotherm. Not very common I'm guessing but could be wrong.

My 1750s house is made of native rock and recycled ships timbers! The native rock is Cambrian (very simple life forms begining to evolve), comprising silts and sands metamorphosed, folded and distorted into some very hard rocks with folded layers of more fractureable parts. Odd igneous intrusions pass through the native so can also be in the walls. These are 'held together' with old mortar which turns to dust if you look at it. Centuries of rodent residence have produced cavities of unknown proportions! The external walls are 60 cm to 1 metre thick. Various coatings have been used, dab and dot, concrete render with plaster or 'filler' and structural wallpaper as mentioned elsewhere! 'Filler' is pink, large grained and hydrophilic. It has the structural integrity of an eggbox, when wet, a wet eggbox. Picture hanging, easy using the ones with several short pins. Shelves, use floor to ceiling shelving units, tying in at ceiling/joists. Shelves in alcoves, wedge them in, the alcove will be narrower towards the base. Kitchen units, you framed it out to run electricity behind for flush sockets. Yes putting power fittings on any external wall is almost impossible without framing and while you are at it, insulating. Would I move? No it's taken 26 years to understand this house, too much time invested! 🤣🤣

Gosforth Handyman to the moooooon!

Thank you for sharing your knowledge, really interesting. Is there a way of telling/educated guessing if your external walls do have cavity insulation? We've recently moved into an 80s detached house, and it can get cold soon after the heating's off, so much so that I'm curious. It's red brick external, throughout, laid end to end so without the shorter side lay that you mentioned as an indication that it wouldn't be cavity. Thank you.

1903 terrace here. Bricks are variable, some easy to drill into, others as hard as diamonds. Also some walls have clinker internally. You get to know which walls are easy to to drill into.

Great video! I live in a 1950s council house property and yeah its exactly how you explain. All solid walls but upstairs its got blockwork like in your 1920s property and yeah very thin paster on top. Downstairs i think it's brick in all internal downstairs walls because thats what use to hold the stairs up. All have the gab that you explained with ball like insulation so it looks like someone pumped in insulation at a later date. The utility room doesn't have an insulation gap just a piece of something in the middle but not sure what it is. Its amazing how much history these properties have because my house had 5 layers of wall paper in the kitchen and painted wall paper in every room. Also i can slightly see what colour my door frames use to be and the clours were brown, yellow, green then white. Was a real nightmare removing wall paper and the old plastered wall were totally ruined so we had to replaster the house. I live with my parents and they bought this house 2 years ago, sadly had no orginal doors but i expect the doors were probably from 1990s and so is the current bathroom and old kitchen

My 1927 house as brick walls with a small cavity. You're spot on about the bricks being rock solid. Unlike modern bricks, which have frogs or holes in, they're effectively a lump of fired clay. The dust is a nightmare as well and stains things easily. One thing I have noticed with these old walls is the mortar is incredibly soft so care needs to be taken when drilling: if you put pressure on expecting brick but hit the mortar, you're liable to land the drill chuck into the plaster 😂 Final pitfall with old houses is in certain places, i.e above windows, there's likely to be loads of holes already hiding behind the plaster and can cause issues with getting a good hold with your plugs.

Your mileage may vary on concrete blocks and drills - I needed an SDS drill for mine in Cornwall! The aggregate is variable according to the local geology, and I would hit bits of stuff every bit as bad as brick. Granite seems likely.

This is very helpful. I just bought a flat here in Glasgow, a Victorian tenement. 1900.

You help me Very Very much Thankyou........

Breeze blocks are what you called clinker blocks. That is they are made from breeze which is the large bits left from burning stuff usually coal. These days they are made from aggregate rather than actual breeze.

We're in Kenilworth and our house is a 1902 Arts and crafts style built from local bricks like iron. One builder burnt out a drill and a couple of core drills during a kitchen job. He said he'd never come across such hard bricks.

My house was built in 1879… and has cavity walls and a damp proof course. It’s only a 2up 2down so nothing fancy, they just did a flipping great job building it back in the day. External bricks are properly soft though.

Mine's 1860s 15" thick sandstone, with hard as anything Whitehaven brick, all covered in traditional plaster. Thankfully, these two will pretty much support anything.

I've got something whose mount holes form a grid of sorts. Most holes hit solid brick but a few went into something softer, possibly mortar. Is there anything that can be done to firm up the softer spots to get a more solid fixing?

Our Cornish terrace has a rubble and cob wall inside of the granite outer. Fixing anything it always a challenge!

Love it.

My first house (Harlow new town) 1950s was 'nofine' No cavity. Just cement and flint. Current house (also Harlow, also 50s) cavity wall. External skin is brick. Internal skin is terracotta pots.

Useful video! Though my 50s concrete blocks are stupidly hard compared to other (non-thermalite) ones I've encountered. Can only assume they used some kind of unobtanium as the aggregate. Need the SDS or I'm there all day with the combi. Loves to deflect the drill bit too. Got any tips for avoiding the hole suddenly moving 3mm to the left?!

My walls are made of ears .... The Wife knows exactly what i have been doing, while she is at work.

We live in an 1800’s cottage with 2ft thick external walls. However in the 1980’s some internal partition walls of paramount board were added. I wasn’t aware of this until I came to remove tiles from a bathroom wall. Intending to re board the wall I bashed several holes looking for studs as I’d never come across paramount board. Ended up having to make good to the holes and getting it reskimmed. Nightmare 😢

I remember moving into a new build in the 1970's. I didn't have a drill so used masonry nails for this particular job - or tried to. The nail actually bent unto a 'U' off the brick face and pulled the plaster off. I thought they were too hard to bend and would break, but no. The gas installer took all day to make a hole through the wall for the gas balanced flue. I've never come across such hard bricks.

Imagine the first hole you drill into in your mid-80s bungalow internal wall, that you thought was a stud wall, turns out to go into straw. Piggin' straw! I grew up on a farm, and I know barley straw when i see it! I can't tell if the sound insulating properties are better than an insulated stud wall, but I'd gladly replace all the internal walls in this place with studs. They also have some annoying vertical sink lines in them I assume is at the joints or something. My wife has a thing about pictures and shelves so I live with a constant fear of "Can you just..". Very interesting video as always!

👍👍👍.Thank you

Our house is 1982 and I'm pretty sure our external walls are plasterboard on studs on blockwork as there are places you'll drill and encounter either a small void or solid wood.

1880's cotswold stone in mine, except the kitchen extension, which is a 1990's job. Previous owner plaster-boarded the entire inside for insulation reasons and also because the plaster on the inner walls was so thick and so old, would just crumble away. I've thought about having the plaster board removed, the plaster underneath removed and revealing the stone - but the cost and disruption would be incredible, plus we'd lose a layer of insulation. The stone itself - it must be close to 10 inches thick from outside to in. Suffice to say, the house isn't going to collapse any time soon!

i live in a 2009 block of flats that is brick exterior , walls sound like dot dab plaster inside ,but the lease says its a steel frame , so im assuming its just steel work going around the building like studs and RSJs for the roof and maybe flooring as well

Yeah, bought a 1930's house and along with it had to buy a hammer action sds drill..... Even then it gets resistance and i just have to pray whatever is blocking is not too big and stay straight.

The "Test Tuesday" concrete brick is back!! 😁

The walls in my 1870's house are pretty much made of dust 😂

I have paramount walls all upstairs but I thought at least one wall would need to be solid load bearing to support the loft joists? Or is it supported by the roof? The downstairs wall along the stairs is blocks but then changes to paramount when you go upstairs. You can see how out of level the downstairs wall to upstairs wall is where it changes material.

Seems to have dot and dab on concrete blocks in a 2000 house? Drill through the plasterboard then the hole gets ripped wider as the drill wanders off around hard lumps in the block. The number of plaster board patches I've had to make are annoying. Any tips on dealing with this combo?

Our house is early 60s and has breeze block on all internal walls, including non-supporting ones. In a way I prefer this to stud walls as you don’t have to worry about finding studs or using plasterboard anchors but they do pose some problems. The main one being that drill bits have a tendency to wander - either slipping into a void or hitting a particularly hard bit of internal aggregate. This becomes frustrating when getting two holes level is important - like hanging a TV mount or a pair of picture frames.

Used to be Heaton 30s brick and lathe and plaster non load bearing. Now 50s Durham brick cavity and brick load bearing, internal upstairs terracota - horrid brittle things but prefer to lathe and plaster or stud

Ah. So it’s Paramount board in the internal walls on my 1970s house. Great to learn what it is and confirm it’s actually cardboard! Good bit of social history here, thank you.

Hi mate, you said from 1990's it's dot and dab plaster board. What if I renovated my house and moved plaster and decided to use bonding and multi finish instead of plaster board?

My pre 1930s house the mortar is failing which is causing the bricks to move while trying to chase in for sockets

1903 house. Inner walls on 1st floor are what i thought were clinker block as when i drill them pure black dust come out and generally v softm but reading online these blocks only appeared in 1920s. Does this mean these walls have been rebuilt?

I have a late 60s house and all upstairs walls except one is paramount board. The one wall which isn’t is the wall the bath is fixed against so I’m guessing it’s due to the risk of water ingress. In my house the plasterboard is surprisingly strong but despite that, I’m reluctant to hang much more than 10KG off it if that. Unfortunately my revision budget didn’t extend to replacing them all, so I’ve had to stick with them. What interests me is how they’re constructed, as they’re far too big to have been dragged up the stairs. I’m guessing they were just craned in. Love to see some old brochures or footage involving them just to see how it’s done.

1970s ex council house in Bristol here, all the internal walls are paramount board and it's a f*cking nightmare. You're absolutely right about tiles taking half the wall with. Retrofitting new sockets and cat5 involves breaking through all the egg box interior to form a channel.

Try being in a 70’s Wimpey house. Cardboard interior walls. Wet plastered double skin brick exterior walls. Asbestos artex ceilings and 8mm heating pipes. Oh and studded flat roof dormers. Does have nice floorboards but 😄.

one thing...its a nightmare trying to put a Tv up .. are those Corefix good

I've built 2 houses in last 20 years and used concrete block inner on both - cheap, easy to do fixings, and thermal mass makes it really comfortable. Just make the insulation meet the regs.

My house is a mid 1950’s mid terrace council house, the internal walls are terrible to drill, the drill wanders all over and the hole ends up larger than the drill. Even starting with a smaller drill as a pilot doesn’t help much.

My house is from 1949 and the walls upstairs are made of the dark gray/black cinder blocks that you showed in the video. Would these blocks ever be used for a supporting wall?. I am asking as I want to move one of them so I can turn an upstairs cupboard in one of the bedrooms into a room by building over the stairs but the wall seems to be cantilevered on the end of the floor joists that go over the hallway downstairs. (if that makes sense?)

Have you ever come across straw walls? I'm not kidding, my partition walls are made of compressed straw. I've had the most success using a humble wood screw, no plugs required

Victorian terraced house here - bricks crumble to dust if you so much as look at them, don’t even need to switch on the hammer action on the drill, definitely no SDS needed. The internal walls seem to be made of shiplap planks which someone has later attached plasterboard to!

I'm a bricky that's layed concrete blocks for to long , as you were saying brickies that do it all the time I was rubbing some volterol into my back and wrist 😢

When I was doing a renovation of my fathers large 1910 house we cut out a section of the kitchen wall to move the small single paned window to another exterior wall overlooking the garden (previous one was facing the garage) and make it 3 panes wide. While cutting into the wall with a disk cutter, we kept seeing sparks, so had to stop and use a breaker to see what was there... CAST IRON BEDFRAME PARTS, I'm not joking - to "re-inforce" the wall it looks like the people who built it threw whatever long bits of metal they could find into the wall, electrical conduit pipes (with no wire in) and bedframe parts. Lord only knows what else is in there.... Oh and I've just remembered when I was doing a different renovation of a large 1912 house, we stripped back all the old paint (thank the heavens for pressure washers) to the bare lime roughcast and found..... animal bones, shells from mussels, cockles etc, broken glass, broken crockery, floorboard cut nails - I commented to the customer at the time and took photo's, it looks for all the world as though the works had lunch, swept it all up, then mixed it into the roughcast mix, of which 90% was coal clinker, and then slung it at the wall.

Ours is a 1960 house with brick outer leaf, block inner, no cavity and rendered inside with a thin skim of grey plaster!

'Bricks from around 1900 were really hard' - unless you're in London where they are often that dreadful yellow brick, only slightly harder than the morter between 'em. On the plus side, it's a very forgiving material and cracks don't tend to spread too badly, for instance.

Some sand stones are just as hard if not harder than igneous rocks you cannot drill in to them whith ordinary tungsten carbide drill bits thay will get so hot thay will melt before you get anywhere you need much more expensive cobalt drill bits limestone is commonly mistaken for sandstone and can be much softer and easier to drill

paramount is bad you say? Have you heard about stramit boards?

As an apprentice on the north Northumberland coast in the early 70’s I would pay good money to see how you would fix to whinstone (or bluey) without copious amounts of explosives. Commonplace to wear out a couple of bits only to be helpfully and with a certain amount of humour told of its resilience, all part of the joys of the apprentice.. Oh! and pre power tools of which the rest of the outside world had been using for centuries.

Hi I am restoring a farmhouse made of logs and sometimes I have difficulty drilling through them.

2023 Made 4B2 frame, woodchip walls, polystyrene wheater Brickes

Yes I installed a back box to make an electrical socket flush in my 1955 flat the other day and was surprised to find a cavity in the internal wall. Blocks as you suggested and a thin layer of very crumbly plaster.

Our deeds go back to 1642. So, our house construction has quite a few types of wall from wattle and daub, solid 9” brick to modern brick and block via lath and plaster walls and ceilings.

My house was built in 1963, it has paramount walls internally, it was built by Wimpy homes and at the time was ultramodern, it was a nightmare to fit a towel radiator, had to demolish half the wall and rebuilt it with some structure (ironically the roof structure is engineering overkill).

My home in Arizona, USA was built in 1960. It is built of cinder blocks, with cavities in the blocks. The cavities are filled with vermiculite. It was a nightmare putting a hole large enough to bring in my security camera cables as the vermiculite would fill up the hole faster than I could clear it to pass the cables through.

Ours are made of reinforced concrete slabs stacked on top of each other, lol. Post WW1 council housing that was meant to be temporary. Drilling into the walls is insanely difficult and this house could no doubt survive a nuclear blast.

Well, that solves the nature of my internal walls. I’d concluded they were non-standard, but I couldn’t quite figure out what they were. I have metal fixings at 1.2 metre centres - I’m confident (for various reasons) that we have cardboard walls. That sort of thing ought to be disclosable….. 😶‍🌫

1996 cavity wall construction. Is there any insulation in the cavity? Of course not, the whole estate built like that 😢

I have a wall made from bricks turned on their sides making the wall 3 inches thick. Bit scary how little strength it probably has

60s terraced here with brick external (with roughcasting🤮) and brick internal.

Had an 1840's cottage. Any kind of hole drilled in the wall required half a day of making good and patching the plaster😂

My first house had a section of wooden cladding on the front and an even larger section on the back. When upgrading the wood to PVC I found that behind the cladding was a timber frame and then the actual plasterboard of the room….central heating pipes too and certainly no insulation. Terrible design.

You know you have tough walls when the electrician fitting the cooker extractor swears when he sees it, 1800's building with foot thick walls 😂

Cant help looking at that american fridge. Shouldnt it be flushed with the cupboard units,rather than proud of them? Just asking😊

1920's bungalow here, and the inner walls (and at least the inside of outer walls) appear to be cinder blocks - very uneven density...

About to go into a mid 1960’s bungalow, so the wife is going to think I’m mental knocking holes in the walls to find out what they’re made of 😂

1970s - Stramit board. Cut the internal walls with a Stanley knife!

Australia: walls made of nothing, just am air gap between plasterboard and weatherboard.