I hate drywall.  It's fragile, easily damaged, doesn't hold anything.  It eats up square footage in your house with empty voids. 

  Worse, water destroys it utterly. 

   Are there any practical alternatives to drywall?  I guess you could do ICF, but that would be obscenely complex and expensive unless you were doing a commercial building where each concrete wall is directly above the next one in the structure. 

  I mean, maybe some alternative material that you could use on the first floor of a house in a flood zone and in bathrooms?

I am with you, drywall sucks. And after the drywall is wet the wood framing molds and rots.

I lined my garage with cheap galvanized corrugated sheet metal. It is great, I can wash the car or the bike, and if water gets behind it, so what the ICFs are unaffected.

Synthetic stuccoes.....build ICF, then you got the outside walls covered. You could cover the interior walls with cement board, then a stucco coating. Or cover the interior walls with EFIS?????? No worries of water.

Wood paneling, looks great. Better with water than drywall but still affected.

Can't agree with you more. I came across a company called Gigacrete which manufactures a product known as plastermax. Saw them about 1 year ago. Haven't used this product yet but intend to on our next Isomax-Terrasol project this spring. Think it holds a lot of promise!

Heinz Horn
Isomax of MO.

http://gigacrete.com/ PlasterMax is available now for the interior, StuccoMax will be available in a few months for the exterior. Extremely durable product. Impressive stats, figures and numbers. I visited their manufacturing plant in Las Vegas a couple of months ago, and saw everything first hand. Even did the flame test myself with touching the panel on one side while 2500F (burner) was applied to the other. Visit the website and browse around, you'll be amazed!

I used a product made by DOW called Thermax. They sell it in many different configurations and I purchased one of the least expensive forms and I'm quite happy with it. I have a 2,400 SQ-FT basement and so I needed a lot of it. I also have 9 foot poured foundation which is even more expensive. With code you can insulate the ceiling or the walls in the basement and I chose the latter. The insulating contractor will normally glue these panels to the wall but I chose to screw them so that I can take them off the wall. What they are is a foil on one side, fiberglass compressed in the middle and foil with a white plastic on the finished side. They are 1.25 inch thick sheets and are r-10. To do my basement by a contractor was over $7,000 but I found the distributor and purchased the panels for about $32 a 4x8 sheet.

John

http://magnesiacore.com

Maybe the first question should be  - Why build in a flood zone at all?