Stupid Q - those with timber frame houses

clarelady

I know this might be a stupid question but i am going to ask anyway, for those of you with timber frame houses do you find it difficult to put up things on the walls without them moving/falling away.
We live in a timber frame house and i find that all the sanitary fittings are constantly moving as when you drill in you meet a hollow cavity after the plasterboard. Shelves never stay up. I know you can try and find the timber joists but that restricts where you put stuff.

we are looking a building our own house and trying to decide between concrete or TF , i know TF are great for heat etc.
opinions welcomed

mickdw

The house you are currently in was probably fired together by some builder with little care & perhaps little or no support/strengthening for holding fitting etc. Building yourself, you would have much better control over all this kind of stuff & really those concerns should not turn you away from timber frame.

If I personally was building, I would go with blockwork & precast upper floor. This type of construction can be highly insulated & will perform very well if built properly.

soldsold

Some options:

put extra noggins where you plan to hang things

or put plywood or osb boards behind areas you might hang things, cut the wall studs back so after adding the boards the wall is flush to plasterboard

or use fermacell or sasmox boards instead of plasterboard. You can hang fairly heavy stuff off these boards and if you have accurate studwork can just and paint over them but the boards are three times the cost.

Or put up with the positions the studs are at

or use concrete blocks

M three

go with concrete. am renting a timber frame house and no way would i want to have a mortgage on one of these things for 30 - 40 years. god knows what shape timber shape timber frame houses will be like in 20, 30, 40+ years.

concrete would be a far better long term investment. insulation in the timber frame house I'm in is brutal. after you turn off the heat in cold weather the house loses the heat in no time. in hot weather the heat inside the house is unreal, it'd cook ya. when i get home from work you have to throw open all the windows to let the heat out.

OP hanging shelves in a timber frame house is the least of your problems.

I fitted sheets of OSB behind the plasterboard (fermacell) in th ekitchen and utility where I planned to fit wall units.

In theory fermacell should support wall units that are just screwed in, but I just wanted to be sure they didn't fall down (ar chor ar bith)

Splinter Cell

M three wrote: »

concrete would be a far better long term investment. insulation in the timber frame house I'm in is brutal. after you turn off the heat in cold weather the house loses the heat in no time. in hot weather the heat inside the house is unreal, it'd cook ya. when i get home from work you have to throw open all the windows to let the heat out.

You can't blame the structure when you have just pointed out that the insulation is the problem, i.e. most likely glassfibre with no thermal buffering whatsoever. A cellulose insulated timber frame will not suffer from this and, in fact, will perform better than any of the concrete houses still being constructed with 100mm cavities and 50mm of cosy boards on the inside.

dan_d

OP, with regards to the ins and outs of timber frame houses, I can't comment, but almost any plasterboard wall with a cavity is going to be like that.

Firstly a very simple solution is to use rawl plugs. They prevent the screws from falling back out of the wall

Secondly, (an extreme solution) you put board - plywood or, as suggested OSB - behind the plasterboard, giving something solid that will catch the screw and prevent it from coming out.

When you say you are trying to decide what wall type to put in your house - what exactly do you mean? You're hardly referring to the internal walls as being concrete, are you? That's quite a large cost (to my mind) for not much gain - particularly if it's just so you can hang things on the walls. The external walls, definitely but not so much the internal.Bear in mind that screwing things into blockwork and concrete is twice as difficult!!!

If you are building a house, and you're concerned about hanging things on your internal walls, your easiest solution is to put a sheet of ply on the walls, prior to the plasterboard. Particularly in bathrooms, where you'd be mounting sinks,shower heads etc on the walls. You don't need to do the whole wall - for a sink for example you put a sheet spanning between 2 joists or studs (vertically), up to a height of about 1500mm off the ground.Once it carries the weight back to the ground securely that will do. As for hanging picture, shelves etc? Get decent plasterboard rawl plugs.