We’ve been so focused on getting the Smurf room and guest bedroom finished that we’ve completely neglected the hallway that connects them.
It’s all sheetrocked and ready to be mudded on the left side. But the right side needs some love. It’s plaster on brick (no lathe), so there’s no insulation there. While Bradley was busy sheetrocking the Smurf room, I decided to remove all of the window trim and the floor board to prep the hallway for insulation. I also had to remove the trim around the doorway leading that leads into this hall so we could sheetrock that wall.
It was a pretty simple task. Or so I thought.
Hoo boy. Where to begin?
I started with the floor board because it was easy (famous last words), and used a crow bar to pry the board from the wall. Unfortunately for me, I quickly learned that the wood was permanently glued to the plaster. I’m not sure if the wood was attached to the plaster while the plaster was still wet. Or maybe the lead paint that covered both the wall and the board had formed some kind of super bond. Or maybe it was pixie magic that held the two together. Either way, when I pried the floor board loose, 8 inches of the wall pried loose with it.
I think the technical term for this is “a hot mess.”
At least the window trim and sill came off OK:
Too bad I can’t say the same for the door frame I had to remove at the end of the hallway:
Half of the plaster surrounding the doorway fell off in big chucks as I removed the trim. It looks like a bomb went off in the hallway, even after the cleanup.
Our plan was simply to put up some furring strips, insulate with 2 sheets of 1″ foam, and then sheetrock right over everything. The wall was perfectly level, so it would have worked out really well. Now we have to shim the wall to make sure we’re putting our sheetrock up straight. And we have to build it out a little to compensate for the missing plaster. We also have to make sure to build out enough to cover the giant gap between the floor and the wall:
There’s as much as a 3 inch gap at some parts. Ugh. By our calculations, with the stud we’re going to attach to the floor, plus the furring strips, insulation and sheetrock, we’ll be able to completely cover it. No promises, though — we’ve learned our lesson!
What we learned with our little hallway incident:
- Lathe walls are a pain in the @*%.
- Our house, like many other super-old houses, has settled a little. We prefer to think of it as our house having a Gangsta Lean.
- If all the plaster in our house came off this easily, we’d probably expose a lot more brick.
- Don’t ever start a project by saying, “This is easy. We’ll finish it off in one day.” It only leads to broken hearts and shattered plaster.
Oh, man, tough luck…:(
Can’t win em all! It’ll be really, really nice when we put sheetrock up over it so the hallways can stop being one huge eyesore…
I have Lathe and Plaster walls in my place. And the whole building suffers from a ‘gangsta lean’. The building is about 110 years old. What a nightmare the walls were to work with and the mess was unbelievable! But I got there in the end and now it looks sweeeeeeeeet! Your place looks ace!
What I hate most about plaster isn’t the dust or the mess or the crumbliness of it — it’s how freakin’ unbelievably heavy that stuff is! Hauling out bag after bag down a set of stairs, through the house, through the back yard and to the garage….bah humbug, I say!
A good DIYers relationship with plaster is a true love/hate relationship. But it sure took us a while to learn where the love starts. By about 2-3 years of homeownership, we had finally established some good relationship boundaries between the two of us and our plaster. We’re now at the point where we can keep and fix the plaster and lath, no matter how bad of shape it is in. Here’s the primary points what we’ve learned:
1. You can save it no matter how bad it is
2. Plaster buttons are your friend – http://www.kilianhardware.com/ceilbutplasw.html
3. When you need to repair a large hole and it still has the lath behind it, square up the hole and cut a piece of drywall for it. Screw the drywall to the lath, skim over it with 3 coats of mud
4. Use the mix setting type normal weight mud (green text on a brown bag) for at least the first coat.
5. Exposing brick is a dirty job
6. Love your plaster and it will love you back through sound attenuation, solid construction, warmer rooms, and period charm.
The effort is worth it in the end.
Good luck!
Thanks for the tips! We’re trying to love our plaster. We really are. But the plaster doesn’t make it easy. I’ve never heard of plaster buttons. We’re going to need em in a couple of our rooms, so thanks for the introduction =)
Gladly. It takes a lot of practice, but you can go from this:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/oldtownhome/5647463483/in/set-72157626470047885/
to this:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/oldtownhome/5647975103/in/set-72157626470047885/
The photo is from our guest bathroom we did a while back. The ceiling was falling down, literally. I secured the buttons into the joists all over the place, and used extras into the lath on large cracks or unsteady sections. The splotches in the second photo are from the different coats of plaster. They all seem to dry different colors depending on how much water you use. The first coat is always very bumpy, but each coat and sand after, the voids get filled in and evened out. We’ll definitely be doing a post or series of posts on fixing up plaster and what has worked for us.
But it basically involves:
1. Plaster Buttons everywhere and patch holes with drywall where necessary
2. Skim with mud over the whole surface
3. Cut and put fiberglass screen (same as window screen) over the whole skimmed area before it dries
4. Thick skim over the whole thing, let it dry.
5. Sand (use a pole sander that attaches to a shop-vac, w/ drywall filter bags, otherwise it will look like a snowstorm in your house).
6. Repeat steps 4 & 5 until nice and smooth, usually 3 to 4 coats.
7. Step back and look at your amazing walls.