Historic Remake: If These Walls Could Talk, They’d Say ‘Plaster Please’
http://blogs.wsj.com/developments/2012/07/20/historic-remake-if-these-walls-could-talk-theyd-say-plaster-please/by: Constance Mitchell Ford/The Wall Street Journal
I had walls that were cracked and chipped.
Nothing makes an old house feel old and decrepit like cracked and bumpy walls.
But transforming walls from drab and dreary to bright and cheerful isn’t difficult. It’s messy, but not complicated.
When I began the renovation on my 85-year-old Tudor revival-style house, updating and repairing the walls was first on our list. Like most old homes built before World War II, my walls are made of plaster, not the drywall found in most post-WWII homes.
Preservationists insist that plaster is a better product than modern drywall. After all, plaster has stood the test of time. Archeologists say that lime plaster was used as a type of mortar in Egyptian pyramids.
Plaster is a mud-like substance that, when it dries, leaves a hard surface that is smooth to the touch, keeps firm for many decades and holds sound better than drywall. That’s good for parents who don’t want conversations in the master bedroom overheard by the kids in the next room.
- Claudio Papapietro for The Wall Street Journal
- This is the same area after two skim coats, but before painting.
For a more high-end affect, some plasterers add marble dust to the mixture, which leaves an even harder wall finish that can be made to resemble the marble or granite walls found in historic Italian palazzos. (Some call this Venetian plaster, not to be confused with faux Venetian plaster that some paint companies sell.)
Drywall is made from gypsum wrapped in cardboard. It comes in large pre-made wall-size boards that are screwed or nailed in place. Even though drywall is considered a lower-end product than plaster, it has a major benefit: it’s much easier and less expensive to install.
“For every 500 guys who do drywall, you can find only a few who can do plaster,” said Kieran Quilligan, president of Bestwall Plastering Inc. in New York. If the plaster repair job includes intricate crown molding, that’s even a rarer skill that only a small number of plasterers can manage.
While the Internet is filled with debates about which wall construction is better, most specialists believe that both are good products for the right job. “Drywall for modern structures, it’s modular and fits into that scheme beautifully,” said Rory Brennan, chief executive of Preservation Plastering Ltd. in Brattleboro, Vt. “Old houses have their own set of rules predicated upon the materials and techniques used to build them.” Mr. Brennan provides plastering advice to the television program, “This Old House.”
- Claudio Papapietro for The Wall Street Journal
- I had just one plaster wall that needed to be replaced. Here it is after the work.
Not me. I took great pains to repair plaster, although I used a less expensive plastering method. The die-heart preservationists prefer that plaster walls are repaired or replaced using the most historically accurate — and most expensive — method, which is a three-coat system that requires a skilled plasterer to actually re-build the wall from the laths. A faster method is to install blue board over the laths and cover the boards with a plaster veneer.
The least expensive method, which works well on walls that aren’t badly damaged, is a simple skim coating, where a layer of plaster, sometimes combined with joint compound or spackle, are layered over the entire wall and sanded smooth.
Lucky for me, I had only one plaster wall — above the bay windows in the master bedroom — that needed to be replaced. For that, Edgar, my contractor, used the blue board system. But the remaining walls were just badly cracked and chipped, which was easily addressed by receiving two skim coats.
The end result was better than I expected. The walls are beautiful, rock hard and have a slight shimmer. When painted, they were somewhat luminescent.
- Steve Reed Photography
- Examples of other Tudor-style homes: slide show.
From start to finish, it took four weeks to complete most of the house, at a cost about $200 a day. But the results are so pleasing that I can’t complain.
