Bonding Plastering
Took Friday off in order to get some bonding plastering done.
I’d booked into the garage to get some paperwork sorted on the new Tiguan and headed off there first thing in the morning in order to get this job out of the way. Sunderland is a bit of a hike and I had expected to get a stone-chip sorted out too but it turned out to be a job that they’d previously tried fruitlessly and the trip turned out to be two hours out of my morning for a simple signature. Still it needed to be done and it was another tick on my list.
On the way home I popped into the Bishop Auckland’s B&Q to pick up some odds and sods but only ended up buying a bundle of paint samplers. I had intended to get some filler that was recommended by a work colleague but after a visit to Homebase and Jewson’s it turned into a pretty ineffective search. Actually not so unproductive as the chap on the counter in Jewson’s turned out to be an ex-painter and decorator and he educated me as he’d never heard of the filler I was searching for and he usefully recommended me to stick to the Easi-fill 45 I’d been planning on using. On the way back from Jewsons I headed to the newsagents in Woodland, I’d not been there before, it was rather tiny but very lovely and run by the equally lovely Dorothy. I was in there to search for a couple of books produced locally by Len Teasdale about the history of Copley. I’d already been lent one by a neighbour and my house featured in it a bit, I asked Dorothy if she had a copy and said she didn’t but to hang on a bit. On that she picked up the phone:
“Leonard, I have a young man here who’s interested in your books on Copley”…
“You’ll drop them off tomorrow, thanks Leonard”
Anyway that’s how things are done up here. I also made a mental note to take a photo of the magazine rack in the shop. Lots of tractor, vintage tractor, practical pig keeping etc. magazines, it really is a bit rural up here.
Back at the ranch it was already lunchtime, my precious hours passing away rapidly.
Had a spot of food and then I cracked on with the work, planning ahead the night before I’d done a bit of work in PVAing the two fireplaces in the bedrooms, basically a nice 1xPVA to 4xWater mix liberally painted all over the brickwork. This was now dry but had done a good job in sealing up the brickwork, now to make it even more sealed and a bit more tacky with a liberal coat of 1xPVA to 1xWater, while drying I popped across the road on a couple of errands to take back that Copley history book I’d borrowed and to forward on Rita’s mail.
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After a chat I got back indoors to find the PVA lovely and tacky, so I watched a couple of YouTube vid’s on mixing bonding coat plaster and applying it to fill gaps and fireplaces. PVA still tacky I mixed up a tub of Thistle Bonding Plaster with a drill fitted to my new mixing paddle. I unboxed my new plasterer’s float/trowel and my cheapie plastic hawk and after a bit of dithering with the thickness of the mix (remember kids to never add water to the plaster, it’s plaster to water) and I was ready to ladle out the contents onto the hawk.
I must stress here that I was quite nervous of getting this all wrong. I know that money is beyond tight now and if I was to get the basics wrong now and the project could be lost. So it was with some trepidation that I started applying the bonding plaster to the fireplace. I smoothed it on and after a while I started to get the action of applying the plaster to the float and the float to the wall. The first coat was good but I felt that it would take a little more than one coat to finish it off, so once I had a liberal smooth-ish covering of the brickwork I stopped and waited for the plaster to go off.
I was more than proud of what I’d done, standing back and admiring my work I felt that what I’d done was as good if not better than some of the professional jobs I’d seen online.
Anyway there was still a long way to go before I could start patting myself on the back.
After an hour or so of waiting it was clear that this bonding coat wasn’t going to be going off in the near future so I planned for a morning start on the second coat. I did do a bit more patching and bringing out some of the dips but the major work was to be done on the Saturday.
In order to flesh the day out though I did a few more jobs:
A bit of oiling on a chainsaw my sister had loaned me to test if that was the reason it wouldn’t cut butter. Oil liberally applied and it took minutes to cut a one inch thick branch… it wasn’t the oil then.
A bit of Easi-fill 45 filling plaster was coated liberally over a bit of lumpy wall too, this is what the decorator had recommended. The idea was to alleviate the need for a skim plaster coat to all the gnarly walls and the necessity of removing skirting boards, picture rails and the need for the requisite skill level to achieve a nice finish. I’d watched my “Mastering Plastering” DVD and I reckon I could have made a good fist of doing the job but hey the decorator had said this is what he’d used for years and I was ready to give it a try – actually the walls aren’t bad at all, it’s mainly uneven paintwork that’s causing all the humps.
The Easi-fill 45 was mixed in a small tub which was good as it went off almost immediately and stiffened in no time, if I’d done it in a large bucket then I would have been left with a large plaster cast of the bucket. Strange thing was though was that on applying it to the walls it filled every nook and cranny but then refused to go dry. It seemed to me it was going to go off on the wall in no time but after hours of waiting this looked like another job for Saturday.
Anyway a few more jobs – not least cleaning all of the plastering buckets and tools, a nasty job but the key to good plastering is clean tools and buckets – an early night and Saturday dawned.
A quick breckie, jumped into my overalls and back mixing bonding plaster and PVA.
A quick dose of 50:50 PVA a short wait and the liberal application of more bonding coat. I was in two minds as to whether to leave the bonding coat shy by a couple of mil’s of the fireplace surface but I decided in the end to go for a flush finish. A bit of jiggery-pokery, a bit of talent and a bit more luck and hey presto a beautifully done coat of bonding plaster to both fireplaces. This would you believe (along with a trip to the newsagents to pick up both the Copley history books, washing, dishwashing, setting the fire, cutting logs) took the entire morning. Again I was very pleased with the results, I was beginning to get the hang of this, hopefully pride is not always before a fall.
A quick lunch and more bonding plaster, I was beginning to get cocky and I needed to wait for the new plaster to go off so I started plugging more holes. Bonding plaster is useful on big holes, so first it was a trip downstairs to trip off the sockets and light switches in the bedrooms and then the lovely task of filling all the chasing work the electrician had done in fitting these sockets/switches. I then turned to ceiling cracks and cracks in the end joins between the ceilings and the walls. Nothing structural you understand, just those cracks that had been produced by the ceiling moving before I’d put in the RSJ to support the weight of the roof.
This took ages, not nice work too, along with this work, the mixing and the cleaning up afterwards it took my entire afternoon.
A quick trip over to see my daughter, who was puzzled by the drying plaster on my face and then back to the job.
Now to the Easi-fill , I dug out my sander, my respirator and a pair of goggles. I quickly lost the bag that one attaches to the exhaust of the sander and set about the filler I’d bodged all over the crazed wall yesterday. The sander fitted with a fine grain sandpaper it made quick work of the filler and with a bit of concentration I got quite a brilliant smooth finish. The Easi-fill seems wonderful, all those years before struggling with Polyfilla, this stuff fills the tiniest of cracks and sands easily to a smooth board finish. Polyfilla in my previous experiences was my tool of choice, however it was expensive, it was hard to squeeze out of tube and it was murder to sand. Easi-fill though takes much longer to get firm but the finish is smoother and the sanding is much easier. There is one problem though, the dust, the dust is so fine and there is so much of it. I was really pleased that I’d wore a proper respirator to tackle the sanding as a dust mask wouldn’t have handled it, the dust is uber-fine and floats everywhere. It got so bad that it was as thick as a Victorian pea-souper and I could stand it no longer, so despite the cold I cracked open two windows and went outside to watch the dust blowing out in such a thickness that it looked like smoke drifting from a burning room. Even with the dust bag fitted it still went straight through the fabric, I think I need a hoover attached to the exhaust to sort this out.
Anyway more bits and bobs done, a quick curry, a late night watching a rather poor new Doctor Who and off to bed for an early night.
Things are sloooowwwwly coming along. Hopefully the skim coat works over my bonding coat.