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?
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
It's the repainting that bothers me
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Odds are you are compromising the fire safety of your residence by doing this.
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.
Maybe you're thinking of poly-B, not PEX.
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.
No -- use doors.
So a bunch of doors everywhere you don't open for potentially 100 years?
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.
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.
If you think the drywall access situation is bad, don't start working on your cars.
Cheaper than building them behind concrete or brick.
I think the question is: why are they behind anything to begin with?
Conduit all the things and paint to match?
This is essentially what some industrial-style lofts do.
Probably not legal.
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.
You don’t need to explain that to me.
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.