I have a 1914 bungalow in Sacramento and I don't "understand" the walls. In most places if I try to put a nail in it will only go in very slightly and then seems to hit a granite wall. The area around the part of the nail that has gone is crumbles in a very rough way. <br>I've read messages about plaster walls and non-plaster walls but I don't know how to recognize what I have and how I should go about managing it (ie:; hanging a picture). <br>On a more sophisticted note; while doing the prep work for painting my kitchen today I finally made sense of the primitive plywood shelves and folding shutter doors on the lower portion of an otherwise beautiful floor to ceiling corner built-in: after removing the shutters we could see evidence that there had originally been pull-out flour bins there. <br>On the oposite side of the room we discovered that the modern cabinet that holds the sink is also hiding the bottom half of a chimney cabinet. Fortunately the cabinet had upper and lower doors, and the top one is accesible.At least they left the lower one in there. Too bad that it's really not feasible space wise to remove the newer cabinet (well maybe some day..) Anyway it would be a great hiding place. <br>

Our current bungalow has similar walls. I think you are facing extremely hard rough plaster with a finish coat of sand plaster. We gave up trying to nail into our walls because we were crumbling the finish plaster and not making more than a dent in the rough plaster. When we tried drilling pilot holes for the nails with our regular drill bits, the bits dulled before we could get decent holes drilled. So we finally had to get a set for masonry walls. This does work. <br> <br>

Just a guess, but perhaps your walls are metal lathe instead of wood. Perhaps that's why you're always hitting "granite."

This is what happened when we tried drilling into the bathroom wall to make room for a new junction box. Drill bits and jigsaw were dulling and/or breaking...couldn't figure out what was going on. Once we took off the medicine chest we could see a large section of wall had been repaired with plaster over metal lath. <br> <br>