We recently bought a home with an upstairs loft area, advertised as a bedroom. We've found out from several contractors that the drywall is unusually thin–almost 1/4 inch. We've put two gigantic holes in the wall by accident in two months. For the state of Virginia, in the building code, does drywall have to be a certain thickness in a bedroom area?
Drywall thickness
drywall
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Best Answer
The building code won't help you here. Even if it was against code (which it probably is not), you already bought the house. Building codes aren't retroactive inasmuch as you can say, "hey, this violates code! I'm going to sue the person who did it!" If that was the way things worked, everyone would be liable for everything, because all houses are full of code violations committed by both homeowners and builders, many explicitly OK'd by building inspectors themselves.
If your drywall is so thin that you're regularly damaging it, you don't have a lot of options besides replacing it with thicker drywall or putting another layer on top of it. Shouldn't cost more than $1-2k if it's only a single room, if that.