Plastering for idiots
Although I only had a day to work on the house this weekend I had the distinct advantage in having an extra two pairs of hands in the form of my wonderful big sister Sandra and bro’-in-law Russell. They were up to see our folks and were kindly offering a day of service at the freezing house in the hills.
The day started with the first flurry of snow of the season and this had laid into icy patches that would hamper my sis’ and bro’s journey through the Pennines. I got up early and cracked on with jobs before they arrived, I put the fire on in anticipation of breaking through the coldness of the house, I sorted out the spare bedroom and freed up some floor space in there currently occupied in a paper filing exercise. After this it was on with the washing, emptying the dishwasher and a quick breakfast before they turned out.
Once they arrived, I gave them a quick nickel tour of the work I’d done, showed them the job in hand, pointed them at some tools and after a quick cuppa they were straight into the job. The job was a nasty one, it started with the emptying the last unfinished bedroom of all the furniture and oddments. Once empty it would be the even nastier job of stripping the walls and ceiling of the ageing multi-layered wallpaper. They’re good grafters and as they made some headway I popped out to the fuel merchant to buy some ovoids, Russ helped further and prior to me leaving he cleared car space by carrying in some bags of plaster and jointing compound that had been resident in the boot of my car.
On returning with six bags of ovoids I pulled on my overalls, a necessity I’d found in the business of plastering as one does tend to pick up quite a bit of plaster on one’s clothes. The first job was to finish the wall I’d plastered with the Easi-fill jointing plaster.
If you’ve just joined these posts then you’ll not know that I’d not had an easy time with the Easi-fill, it’s spectacular ability to fill holes wasn’t being reflected in its ability to skim a wall, it was just too stodgy. I’d tried thinning it but that wasn’t good either, it just wasn’t working too well. I’d looked around the internet prior to working this time and there was oodles of evidence that it would work well and evidence that it offered a simpler solution to plastering than plaster, but it just didn’t work for me.
Some head-scratching had gone on earlier in the week and I’d fallen on the idea that I was over-doing the jointing compound. The Easi-fill jointing compound was the king of jointing compounds and its uses were in filling and jointing dry-lining. No-one in the online skimming tutorials had mentioned Easi-Fill by name, perhaps I needed a more generic – and cheaper – jointing compound.
It was this conclusion I arrived at and the bag of jointing compound Russ had kindly carried into the house earlier was a nice cheap and basic jointing compound. I mixed up a batch and it seemed to work, I can’t say for certain whether it was the compound itself, or a mix and match of better lighting (daylight), more experience, a better mix of compound to water – or what – but it seemed to go on better. A couple of hours later and my first wall was complete, not perfect but it would sand down if I needed to sand it down.
Sandra and Russ then appeared from their upstairs travails, a quick tour verified that they’d been uber-busy and the little back bedroom’s contents were now residing in the large bedroom. Not only had the gear all been moved, it was now shining bright after a dust and a spring clean, all the furniture was neatly arranged and everything that had been a messy splurge was now sorted into logical piles. They are a wonder to behold.
A quick lunch of Asda pasties provided by my fabulous sibling and hubby, washed down with mugs of steaming tea and some yoghurt bars in my sub-bearable living room and it was back to the job in hand.
[doptg id=”62″]
I was now moving from jointing compound and into the mystical art of experimenting with plaster while San and Russ were moving into wallpaper stripping. Prior to my plastering I kitted them out with the Karcher steamer and while it was heating up Russ and I made short work of the skirting boards and I also whipped out a reciprocating saw, cut the pipes to the radiator and had it downstairs in minutes.
Once they started on the stripping I headed downstairs, I ripped open a 25kg sack of Thistle Multi-Finish and now rather than a jointing knife my new tool of preference was a plasterer’s trowel. I mixed up a batch of plaster in a bucket with the mixer attachment on my old Black and Decker drill and filled with a little trepidation I spooned a large lump of the mix onto my hawk using my bucket trowel….
Working on the right hand side of the fireplace first I followed some advice a plasterer had told me some days earlier, forgive me if I’m repeating myself here but he said: be sure to say this in a Obi-Wan-Kenobi voice and you’ll get the impression he had on me.
Anyway he said… and this really is plastering for idiots.
“Get the plaster on the wall, don’t worry about the finish, once you’ve covered the entire wall then go back to the start, use a brush and water, paint it onto the plaster then polish it with your trowel, do this again and again until you get an even finish”
Hardly “Use the force” but it just made sense to me.
Plastering has always been portrayed as a black mystical art to me, something that one learns over years, something that just doesn’t come easy. However the little speech by that plasterer made a bit of an impact, I was now reasonably confident that I could plaster a wall, nay even a ceiling, if I followed his helpful advice.
I’d done two fireplaces, they’d not turned out bad, how hard could it be?
Anyway the side-wall was tough, there were lots of edges and it’s hardest to do those, still never mind I cracked on. Polish on, polish off…. No hang on, plaster on, polish off, polish off etc. it seemed to work.
By the end of the wall, it was apparent that although it wasn’t the finest finish in the world, it wasn’t half bad either, any imperfections could easily be ironed out with my trusty tools and fillers, followed up by liberal sanding… should it be required.
The next wall was between the fireplace and the end wall and involved working around a window. Fidgety work like this I do not like and this was taking ages, I’d managed to do an itty bitty wall and now I was working around this window and it was now hours into the afternoon. Working my way down the wall and applying the plaster I noticed some flaking plaster, I inserted a finger and pulled away a large lump of rotten bonding plaster, this wasn’t good. A bit more prodding and poking and the entire wall under the window, barring a bit of stubborn stuff at the top, was stripped back to the stonework. I could have left it alone and plastered over it, but hey why spoil a job that I’ve been over engineering all the way through from day one.
At this point I moved onto the end wall and just as I did Sandra and Russ appeared, they needed to head home but they’d miraculously finished stripping all four walls of the bedroom and had only been held up by the four layer bedroom ceiling that had been further reinforced with layers of paint. They’d managed to strip a third of this ceiling but the other two thirds would have to wait for their return in the future.
With Sandra and Russ heading off to the warmth of my parents I resolved to get the end wall done. So radio on and a cuppa polished off I attacked the wall with my newly acquired plastering talents, slow progress but not bad for a beginner.
Once the end wall had been finished, the missing plaster patch was PVA’d and bonding plastered and I finished by scrubbing down all my tools in the kitchen sink, it was now ten in the evening.
I was knackered, so a quick curry, a dollop of the latest Doctor Who, a bath and off to bed.
Plastering is like aerobics and by the end of the evening I could hardly straighten, my back was twinging and my arms were aching. This was really good exercise, I was in bits but I felt as though I’d achieved something. All my work and the splendid hard work that my sis and bro-in-law had thrown into the mix had gone a huge way toward getting the house finished.
Splendid….