Bump & Grind

Now that the kitchen range hood is nothing more than an unpleasant memory it is time to get back to the even more unpleasant task of dealing with the plaster in the parlor. There are no two ways about it, working with plaster, whether you are talking off or putting on, is a mess.

For those of you who are not long time readers of the blog, the plaster in this house was put on in unique fashion for the time. The walls on the entire inside of the house are sheathed with 1X8, T&G “plaster boards”. Plaster boards were milled locally in the Carson Mill at the turn of the century. The boards have dovetail grooves running the length of the boards, spaced 2-inches apart. As the plaster is pressed on to the walls, it fills the dovetail grooves, which is what keeps the plaster on the walls.

An 1893 article in The Humboldt Standard refers to them as “patent grooved lath” and says before the plaster goes on “it makes the walls look as if covered with matched and grooved flooring”. The article also claims that this method saves mortar and makes the home more sturdy and better insulated than traditional lath. While all of that may be true, this method also makes it a pain in the ass to remove the old plaster and get the walls ready for new plaster.

I only strip off the plaster that is failing so most of it comes off effortlessly. What remains though, is the plaster that was forced in to the grooves back in 1895. I must get that old plaster out of the grooves before the new plaster goes on and it does not come out willingly. In the past I used a Rotozip tool with a plaster bit to grind out the plaster. This really makes an incredible mess. As the burred plaster bit hits the plaster in the grooves it sends out a 3-foot rooster tail of ground plaster. Even working with the Rotozip in one hand and a shop-vac hose in the other, the room quickly becomes choked with dust. I must wear what amounts to a home-made haz-mat suit when doing this.


Well, after years of hard work, the Rotozip finally bit the dust – no pun intended. When I was working in the dining room using the Rotozip to remove the remaining hearth tile the front bearing started to make a little noise. By the time I was half way through the foyer and stair hall that little noise became a high pitched scream and now it was both the front and back bearings that were going. Towards the end of the foyer, just to get it to run I would have to flip the switch and the smack the housing with a hammer to get the bearings to move. Needless to say, the plastic housing did not like being smacked with a hammer and eventually I broke the on/off switch.


On Thursday I went to Sears to buy a new Rotozip, but came home with a Multitool. The Multitool comes with a number of different attachments, but the one I use is a flat blade with teeth on the end. The blade moves back and forth at high speed and does a pretty good job of breaking the plaster apart in the grooves. It doesn't remove it from the grooves quit as effectively as the Rotozip, but doesn't make nearly the mess as the Rotozip, either. What remains in the grooves gets shop-vaced out. Initially this process makes much less of a mess, but once the shop-vac comes on the dust starts to get thick. I now run the shop-vac just before I'm ready to finish up for the day, then close up the room for a few hours until the dust settles.

One down and six to go.

Plaster Pop

POP!


POP!


POP!


As you can see I am making progress in the dining room. As impressive as those pictures are, they are strategically framed so as not to show the scaffolding, tools, paint pails, and general filth that still covers a lot of the floor.

I still have three big jobs left.

1) Big: Strip the windows. When I stripped all of the paint off the woodwork several years ago I never stripped the windows and window jambs because I wasn’t sure of the best way to do it without breaking the glass. I prefer a heat gun and I was afraid the high heat would break the glass. I still prefer a heat gun, but I feel more confident with it now. When I stripped this room it was the first time I had ever stripped paint before.

2) Bigger: Finish the floor. I need to replace a few floorboards and then even out the current surface. The plan is to finish the original redwood floor as it was originally done in 1895 with tinted shellac. What I need to do is fill some minor nail holes and some larger holes from electrical conduit. I also need to smooth out the current finish. This is the original tinted shellac finish, which was hidden for decades. I had to use a heat gun to get up some tar paper that was put down under some particle board in the 70s. Once I get it smooth, I’ll use aniline die to tint the shellac a deep, dark maroon and then slather on a half dozen coats, or so. Most of the floor will be covered with carpets.

3) Biggest: Repair the fireplace. I want to be able to burn coal. To do that safely I need to line the chimney. The big problem here is that the chimney no longer extends up through the roof. I need someone to line the chimney with a double-walled, stainless steel liner, repair the fire box, and rebuild the chimney so it extends high enough above the eves to meet code. It is not going to be cheap, but what is even worse than the cost is the fact that I can’t do it myself. In eight years the only time I’ve ever hired someone to work on my house was when a friend faux-grained my upstairs bathroom door. I don’t like other people working on my house. I’m sure there are therapist out there reading this and salivating at the thought of getting me in for sessions to deal with that, but that is just the way it is.


I’m very happy with the paint and the medallion, which I painted semi-gloss white. This rest of the paint scheme is a little more bold that I usually do. Every room I’ve painted so far has had color on the walls. To date, I have no white or beige walls. Bold, contrasting colors is something I have not tried, and red walls can go horribly wrong very fast.

I must have gone to every paint store in Eureka, Arcata, and McKinleyville looking at reds. In the end though, picking the gold color was the real challenge. I found a red called “Bolero” at Sherwin Williams almost immediately, but continued to look at reds over the next few weeks to see if there was something else I liked better. There wasn’t.

The gold took a lot longer. I actually bought samples and tried a few on the walls before I made the decision. That is something I’ve never done before. I ended up going with Benjamin Moore’s “Bryant Gold”. This was the first time I’ve used Benjamin Moore and I really liked the paint. It was pretty much one coat, with some touch-up afterwards. Not so with the Sherwin Williams.

Sherwin Williams can be frustrating because you never know what you’re going to get. Some of their interior dark bases are very watery. I just don’t understand it. The exterior paints are great no matter whether it is a dark or a light base. I went in and ordered the Bolero in flat, interior latex, Super Paint and the guy told that color does not come in that paint.

Uh?!?

I could only get Bolero in Super Paint if I went with semi-gloss. That would probably end up looking like I painted the walls in red Jell-O. I had to get it in Duration, which doesn’t come in flat. In Duration the lowest luster you can get is matte. Some paints come in matte, low-luster, and gloss, while others come in flat, satin, and semi-gloss. I mean, what the hell?

So I ended up with Bolero in Duration, matte. My blood is thicker than this paint. It took 4 coats to cover the walls. It is not that it took more paint – I didn’t even go through the gallon. It just goes on so thin that you must apply many coats to get good coverage. Very frustrating.

In the end I’m happy with it, so I guess that is what is really important.



I also made and installed picture rail to go at the confluence of the two colors. I went back to Almquist Lumber {why does that name sound familiar} to get more salvage, old-growth redwood and whipped up a batch of picture rail on the router.

I also Fine-a-Lee trimmed out the little dumb waiter style door I made oh so many years ago. I didn’t think I would ever get to that. But with that, the trim is this room is done-didly-un. My dining room woodworking days are behind me. Well, except for the windows, but that is just paint stripping, and I ask you, who doesn’t love to strip paint? No one – that’s who!

I also FINE-A-LEE finished the electrical in the whole entire house. Back in the 1970s they snaked half-inch metal conduit through the house to supply electrical outlets. It was beyond hideous but at least people had outlets and were not trying to plug everything in to the 4 outlets in the house. That’s right, I said 4. Prior to 1972 this 3500 square foot house had a total of 4 outlets in it, with most being tied in to the original 1895 wiring. Another fire waiting to happen.

I removed it all years ago when I rewired, but I never removed it from the dining room because of the paneled dado that extends 3 feet up the walls. In other rooms I cut holes in the plaster and installed modern boxes and outlets and brought everything up to code. I couldn’t bring myself to cut in to the dado. In the end, I installed the outlets in the baseboard. I had to cut in to the old redwood, but it looks so much better than the crappy conduit boxes.

One of Three

The first plaster medallion is up!

I wrote about it the other day. While the medallion is real plaster, it is a reproduction. I bought it several years ago at Ohmega Salvage in Berkeley. I recall that the guy who sold it to me said it was cast from a mold of an original, period medallion, but that could just be wishful remembering on my part. I’m not really sure if this is a new design or a period design. Either way I like it.



It has a fruit and vegetable motif, so it is a good fit for the dining room.



It came in 5 pieces and the idea is that once it is on the ceiling I will fill in the gaps with plaster and no one will be the wiser. So the first challenge was to get the center section up. There are 2 important issues here:

1) It can’t fall down once it is up.
2) Because it is square it must be aligned properly on the ceiling. The closest wall is less than 4-feet away and it would be noticeable if it was crooked in the room.

So after a few careful measurements I was able to put it on the ceiling. I whipped up a batch of runny plaster, which I would use as an adhesive. This is the way they did it back in the day. Back in the day, though, they had a fresh plaster ceiling and a fresh plaster medallion and some fresh plaster to stick the two together. My plaster ceiling is anything but fresh. I was going to need more.



The plaster would hold it in place, but was not a long term solution. The first thing was just to get it up there and make sure it is straight. I cut some half-inch wide strips of wood that were a little taller than the space between the scaffolding and the ceiling. This worked well to hold it up there while the plaster set. So I smeared fresh plaster on the back and stuck it on the ceiling. I held it with one hand while I maneuvered the sticks in to place.



Ultimately what is holding it in place is the original gas pipe that is still in the ceiling. In the diagram above, you can see the gas pipe running along the top of the ceiling joists. I screwed in a piece of pipe that would hang down a few inches from the ceiling. To that I attached a modern electrical box. I used the center knock-out of the box with a nut on both sides to hold it firm.

To this box a screwed on a modern 4-inch cross-bar. This is what a modern ceiling fixture would normally connect to. This is where the beauty of all of this comes in. Back in the 1890s when fixtures went from gas to electric, the original electric fixtures were little more than modified gas fixtures. This meant that all of the threads on the fittings used in electric fixtures were – and are – identical to gas pipe fittings. Even today you can mix and match like you want.

So I took another piece of gas pipe and screwed it in to the center hole of the 4-inch cross-bar on the box in the ceiling and fixed it with another nut. Now I could stick the medallion to the ceiling and the piece of pipe hung down a half-inch or so past the medallion. To this I mounted another, shallow electrical box with another 4-inch cross-bar. This is what the chandelier will be hung from.

So the chandelier is hanging from the original gas pipe and the ceiling and medallion are sandwiched in-between. Basically, the entire plaster ceiling could fail and fall to the floor during an earthquake, but the medallion and chandelier can withstand pretty much anything.

Keepin’ It Real

Yo, Dawg! Whas’up! This here is G-Diddy and I wanna give a shout-out to all my old house hommies….

No, sorry, I can’t sustain that for an entire blog entry. I am keeping it real, however, when it comes to my plaster walls. Today I finished the up the wall area round the soon to be built dining room cabinets. It came out very nice, but it was not without its problems. Actually, make that the singular: Problem. There was only one.

Before I get to the problem though, I wanted to talk about my new hawk (for those who don’t know, the hawk is the mortar board you use to carry the plaster on while it is waiting to be put on the wall). Thank you once again Mick. My old one was a homemade, plywood POS. This new one, with the padding for my hand was a dream to use, although it did take a little getting accustomed to.

First off, my old one was bigger and I guess I had a habit of loading it up, so it was very heavy. The old one was also plywood and had a bunch of caked on plaster so that only compounded the weight issue. The new one is smaller and made of thin metal. It was just so much easier to carry.

The smaller size did make it a little more difficult to get the plaster from hawk to trowel. I was accustomed to having a little more room to maneuver the blob of plaster. Also, because it is metal, initially the plaster would want to move around a little more. Once it started to set up though, it was fine. Those are all very minor issues, and really, I became accustomed to it quickly.

As it turns out I now own two of these metal ones. When I cleaned out the garages after booting out the woman renting them, I found one in there. So I have an emergency back-up. You know, just in case I have one of those late night plaster emergencies where I need a plaster hawk and I can’t find the first one. I can now go to my emergency back-up. I'm going to sleep a littler easier at night now.

As for the problem, it was with the plaster itself. I had about ¾ of a bag of the finish plaster left over from the butler’s pantry. I used most of that in the brown coat yesterday. There was enough left over for 2 small batches when it came time to do the finish coat. The finish coat goes on very thin, and sets up fast, so I make very small batches. It took 3 batches to do the whole wall.

I knew that the ¾ was not going to be enough for the whole wall. Last week I went back to the same brickyard I always go to in order to get more plaster. I pulled in to the second shed and told the guy I wanted 2 StructoLite and 1 Diamond Finish plaster. As he was loading on the StructoLite he told me he didn’t think they carried Diamond Finish Plaster. I had bought it there several times so I looked around and found 3 bags alone on a pallet several yards away.

He was nice about it, but I did get kind of a “Screw you, Mr. Know-it-all” attitude from him. I commented that I was probably the only person who bought it and I asked what happens when they run out. He assured me they would order more.

Anyway, after finishing off the old bag I cut open the new bag. This new stuff seemed to mix up fine, but when I went to apply it is was full of “floaters”. That is what I call them anyway. These are small chunks of dry plaster that didn’t mix up. Occasionally you will get one or two in a batch but this one was full of them. It was unusable. I went back and mixed some more and they didn’t go away. I mixed some more and they still didn't go away. I ran the drill mixer until it was blue in the face and they still didn't go away! I ended up dumping the whole batch.

I thought it might have been loose pieces from the bottom of the mixing pale. You always leave some residue behind that dries to the sides. It has never been a problem before though. Once plaster sticks to something it pretty much takes an act of Congress to get it off. I mixed up another batch and had the same problem only it seemed to be worse. Again I dumped up.

I then realized it was the plaster that was full of small, hard chunks that would not break down during the mix. Initially I thought maybe the plaster had got damp, but the bags have a plastic liner and they are stored indoors. The bag wasn’t ripped either.

I finally decided is was a combination of being old and because the bag was at the bottom of the pallet. Remember there were only 3 bags left on the pallet. I think the main problem was that it had become compacted at the bottom of the stack on the pallet. The partial bag I had left over from the butler’s pantry was the same age and was fine.

I made a third batch only this time I went through the dry plaster with my hands and tried to break up the hard chunks. It didn’t work. I eventually had to go by a flour sifter and sift the plaster before it would mix properly. I had to go to 3 stores to find the damn thing, too. Ninety percent of it would sift through by just shaking the sifter. I could then force most of the remainder though the screen by hand. There were these little bits at the end that just wouldn’t go through, though.

In the end I got it done, but it took a lot longer than it should have. The finish coat is always the quickest and should have taken about an hour. If you include all of the driving around to get the sifter, this was more like 3 hours. Its always something.

Before


After


Oh, and guess how much sanding I will need to do?

Smooth as Silk

If you think this is about my newly finished plaster walls in the butler’s pantry, you’re wrong. I’m just sitting here, just as I do every Sunday morning, knocking back a few shots Kessler Blended Whiskey. Hmmm, this stuff really is a Smooth as Silk.

Kessler Blended Whiskey Description "Smooth as silk." One of the best-selling blended whiskeys. Simply terrific!
Kessler Blended Whiskey Ingredient at DrinkSwap.com

It just so happens that my newly plastered walls are smooth as silk, as well. What an odd coincidence, don’t you think. Here I am enjoying my morning shots of Kessler’s Smooth as Silk Blended Whiskey, and in the next room there are my smooth as silk plaster walls. It doesn’t get any better than this.





My hopes of finishing the plaster job in the butler’s pantry mid-week were dashed. It was one of those weeks where I just had no energy at all. It’s too bad really, because the skim coating is the quickest of the three coats. All together I would say I spent about 7 hours, start to finish on the plaster work in the room.

As with the bathroom, there is no need for sanding the walls after the final coat goes on. I must say, I’m really getting pretty good at this plaster work. If I’ve learned one thing over the past few years about doing a traditional, 3 coat plaster job, that would be: Don’t Panic. Just take your time, and keep working at it. Eventually, the walls will be Smooth as Silk.

What Can Brown Do For you

I wonder if I’ll get sued by UPS for that blog title? Either way, what brown can do for me is to put me one step closer to being finished with the plaster work on the butler’s pantry. I was able to get the brown coat on today and it went pretty smooth. No pun intended. The idea with the brown coat, as best I can tell, is to get the walls to the proper thickness and to get them reasonably smooth.

The scratch (first) coat is almost straight StructoLite. The StructoLite has the perlite in it and it makes for a very coarse surface. It is called the “scratch coat” because in some applications the plasterer will actually scratch the surface before putting on the brown coat. This improves adhesion. If this were a stucco job I would probably have the brown coat with some sort of texture and this would be the end. I will be putting on a finish coat of straight Diamond Finish Plaster. The finish plaster is lime, gypsum, and dolomite and reminds me of Plaster of Paris.

The brown coat is a 50/50 mix of the StructoLite and the Diamond plaster. You can get it almost perfect with one pass. I leave it like this – a little coarse – to give the finish coat something to grab on to. The finish coat is very thin, maybe a 1/16th of an inch, and goes on very fast. I’m left with almost a full bag of finish plaster and about a quarter of a bag of StructoLite. That’s pretty damn good, but I think I’m going to need another bag of the finish plaster. I think it will take about a bag and half to do the room.

The work today was much easier than putting on the scratch coat yesterday. It was the same amount of wall surface, but required more finesse and less grunt work. The finish coat is even more finesse and less grunt work. I’m not sure if I mentioned it or not when I finished the plaster in the bathroom, but there was no sanding involved once the finish coat is on. That, to me, is the best aspect of plaster – No Sanding!

Itchin’ To Scratch

I got the scratch coat on the walls in the butler’s pantry today. Man, was that a lot of work. This is now the second room that I’ve done complete plaster job on, or at least it will be when I finish it. The upstairs bathroom was largely a skim coat job. The kitchen had some major patching, but there was only one wall that was a complete do-over. The downstairs bathroom was my first complete job.





This room is twice the square footage as the downstairs bathroom and the ceilings are a foot and a half higher. My arms just feel like rubber right now. I recall being a little sore after the bathroom, but not like this. The worst part is holding the hawk full of plaster. It gets heavy and my homemade hawk is not the most comfortable thing to hold. Then, squishing the plaster in to form the keys takes a lot of effort. In the bathroom I was working with traditional lath and you actually needed a soft touch. With this old redwood plaster board you really need to force the plaster against the wall to get it to fill the dove-tail grooves.

All in all, though, it went well. I have less waste with each plaster job I do. I bought 8 sacks, plus I had a half of sack left over from the bathroom. Today I went through 3.5 sacks, so I should be in good shape. I may end up buying another sack of the finish plaster. Tomorrow I’ll do the brown coat, and then do the skim coating throughout the week, next week.

If that happens, then next weekend I start pulling cable for TV/Phone/Network. It shouldn’t be too bad. All of the upstairs stuff already terminates under the floor just under this room. I also need to build a cabinet for the networking stuff, and finish stripping the paint. I need to decide on the ceiling, as well. I might do tin, but I’m toying with another idea. After that it’s the floor and paint. It could be another six weeks before I start on the big dining room built-in. Ideas are still percolating about that.

They’re Real, and They’re Spectacular

The plaster walls are finished, and I couldn’t be happier with the way the they came out. They are as smooth as glass and will require NO SANDING!!!! Woo-Hoo!

The product I skim coated with is the Diamond Veneer Finish Plaster. It is a completely different animal than the Structo-Lite plaster. The Structo-Lite, which is used in the scratch and brown coats, is comprised of Gypsum Plaster and Expanded Perlite. The Diamond Veneer Plaster is made up of Plaster of Paris, Hydrated Lime, Gypsum, and then it also says it may contain limestone or Dolomite. It warns of it giving off heat when mixing with water, but I didn’t experience this, or at least not to the extent that I could tell. The heat would be from the lime reacting with the water.

The finish plaster sets up very fast. The package says to not make more than you can work with in 30 minutes, but I would say it’s more like 10 minutes. With the Structo-Lite I was mixing a 3:1 ratio with water, and with the Diamond I was mixing it 2.5:1. Some batches were so soupy I had trouble getting the plaster from hawk to trowel. Even with that, once it’s on the wall you can rub your hand across it in less than 30 seconds. It sets up that fast. It’s not hard as a rock in 30 seconds but it’s firm enough you can feel for irregularities.

In the Worley PDF it says to mix some of the Structo-Lite with the Diamond, but someone else who was also taught this method of plastering emailed me a few years back and said they were taught not add the Structo-Lite. I think this was done to increase the working time, but the perlite makes it hard to get a smooth wall. I used straight Diamond finish plaster this time.

Did I mention that I won’t need to sand. Woo-Hoo! I used a similar method for the finish coat as I did the other two coats, only everything was either cut in half or doubled. I mixed small batches of 2 quarts dry mix at a time. You must work fast and you can cover a lot with a batch that small because it is just a very thin skim coat. There was really no time for me to stand back a berate myself over the potentially bad job I was doing. As soon as it’s on the wall and reasonably smooth it’s time to work on it with the sprayer and scraper. Then it’s on to the next batch.

Before you know it, it’s all over. I would say it took maybe an hour and a half to do the actual skim coating. There was, of course, a lot of prep and clean-up. Of course, I WON'T NEED TO SAND! Whoo-Hoo! So the walls are pretty much ready for paint. The packaging does say apply one day and decorate the next. I think I’ll wait a while, though. Exactly how long, I’m not sure. I’m not sure if it will dry completely over night.

The other odd thing about the packaging is that it gives a number of surfaces over which the Diamond plaster can be applied. It doesn’t mention Structo-Lite or blue-board, yet two sources have told me this is what they apply the finish plaster over. More confusion from USG. Also, I had to go back today and buy one more bag of the finish plaster. I asked the guy in the warehouse if they carried any other plaster and he said that was it, just the Structo-Lite and the Diamond finish plaster.

Ideally, I would start putting in the floor tile next, but I only have 60 sq ft of tile ready for installation. I want to get all of it cleaned so I can use the best in the most visible areas. Cleaning the tile is just so hard, though. It’s not something I want to do for hours at a time. I think I may go ahead and paint the walls and put up the crown molding next. I’m not sure.

Oh, and did I mention I won’t need to sand the walls. Woo-Hoo!

One final thought on Lime plaster. As we’ve all heard and read, lime plaster walls must cure for a year before you can paint them. In the book I quoted the other day, it said the reason for this was because the new plaster would absorb the oil in the paint and leave you with a mottled finish. It was said a painter would apply 5 coats of oil paint to the walls. Does any of this sound odd?

First, who applies 5 coats of paint? Well, if you were working with paint that was linseed oil, lead, and pigment I guess you might need to. This got me to thinking about the fact that all that I hear about lime plaster is based on 100 year old information. Would new oil or latex paints be absorbed in to the plaster like the old linseed oil paint? Did they start with a good primer 100 years ago? Maybe not? I’m willing to bet that new lime plaster walls could be painted much, much sooner than their 100 year old counterparts if modern paints were used. Hopefully I will be able to test this theory with the next room I plaster.

Here's some pictures of my walls that won't need sanding {snicker}.

My Mom’s idea is to make a stencil of the design in the window and use it as a boarder around the top of the room.




There will be 1X3 crown molding were the plaster meets the beadboard ceiling

Plaster Pictures, As Promised

But first, I want to clear up something about yesterday’s post. I speculated that I had bought two different types of base coat plaster from US Gypsum. After I posted, I went to the USG web site and looked up the product.

The perlited gypsum base coat plaster that I bought last week matched what was on their site. I could not find on the site the bag of perlited gypsum base coat plaster that I had purchased 2 years ago. However, when I downloaded the PDF file that had all of their products and looked up perlited gypsum base coat plaster in that, it showed the bag I had bought 2 years ago, but not the new one. It seems someone in marketing got bored and they just redesigned the bag. The ingredients and instructions for use are the virtually the same on both bags.

Why I have problems with the old product is anybody’s guess. It could just be because of problems inherent with any manufacturing process of a mixed product like this. Maybe the bags I bought two years ago were from the bottom of a mix and they had a little more perlite in them (or not enough). Who knows. Regardless, it seems to be the same product, just different packaging. The site did say there were two versions of the product. One is for lath and the other is for masonry (applying directly over brick or cinder block), but both bags I have indicate it is to be applied over lath.

The old type just sets up so quickly no matter how thin I made the mix. At one point I had it set up on the trowel as I was applying it! I had a quarter inch skim coat of plaster that was hard on the trowel from a mix that was only a few minutes old. This never happened with the new stuff. The working time of the old stuff is 5 to 10 minutes max, while it is 15 to 20 minutes with the new stuff. It is very frustrating to work with. The amount of loss I had in the bathroom was maybe a quart. With the kitchen it was close to an entire bag over the course of the job.

Also, it seems the perlite is a replacement for sand in the scratch and brown coats. They do sell an un-perlited plaster that is to have sand added to it on the job site. I think the perlite puts the “Lite” in Structo-Lite plaster. Being that perlite, once expanded, is an airy, puffed mineral, it must weigh much less than sand. That is not to say that Structo-Lite when mixed with water does not weigh a lot. In fact, it is dense and heavy. I’m sure it’s just lighter than plaster with sand. Oh, those wacky marketers.

Now, on with the show. I should once again point out that I am a novice at plastering. If someone else who seems to know what they are talking about gives you different information, then you should seriously consider taking that advice.

The brown coat went on very well. I mix the plaster in a roughly 3:1 ratio of plaster to water. The instructions give mixing ratios by weight, but I’m not going to weigh dry mix and water. The Red Sea analogy is good, but if given a choice, the scratch coat should be on the dry side and the brown coat should be on the wet site. One batch for me is 6 quarts of dry mix to 2 quarts of water. I mix first with a small hand trowel and then finish mixing with an attachment on a drill. I put up one mix in three batches on the hawk working with a 12-inch metal trowel.

I don’t expect to get it perfectly smooth at first. When initially applying the brown coat to the wall I’m concentrating on thickness. I want to get an even thickness on the wall and get it relatively smooth. I make sure I fill any large voids and get an even thickness at the screeds. Around doors, windows, or anyplace that has trim you should have wooden screeds nailed up to ensure the thickness is accurate. Three eights inch screeds is the standard. I have half inch screeds along the tile, and then 3/8ths every where else. You don’t want wavy plaster where a piece of wooden trim meets the plaster. In the center of a wall though, it’s not as important that it be accurate. This is one of the great things about plaster and old houses. You don’t need smooth, flat walls or perfect angles to start with.

After I have mixed 2 or 3 batches and applied them to the wall I go back over the first batch I put up. This is about 15 or 20 minutes after I applied the first batch. By this time it has the consistency of firm modeling clay. I take a semi-flexible, 4-inch scraper and a squirt bottle and smooth out any areas that came out less than perfect the first time. I fill in any small voids and just kind of clean it up. The next coat is going to be a very thin finish coat, so this is the time to make the wall look good and get rid of any bumps, voids or problem areas. USG says on the bag to leave it rough to except the finish coat. If I was good enough I could probably do the second pass with the 12-inch metal trowel. Maybe someday.

After that I mix another batch and apply it, and then go back and smooth out a batch I put up 2 or 3 batches ago. It goes pretty fast, but does tend to slow down around tight areas. It’s easy to get frustrated around light switches, outlets and other areas like that. Just remember that you have a good 15 or 20 minutes to work with it. I went back to some areas 2 or 3 times and worked on them some more with the scraper and squirt bottle. Once it sets up completely though, you will be reduced to sandpaper, or maybe even a hammer and chisel. This is stuff gets very, very hard when it sets.

Here are some random shots of the room

This is the scratch coat. The walls are very rough.


It’s hard to see but the next two are shots are the same spot on the wall.

This is the first pass.

This is after the second pass with the squirt bottle and scraper.


You can see the wood screeds around the vent.


More shots of the brown coat. This is how it looks now.




Before I started I laid down pieces of cardboard and taped them together. The plaster is much too sticky for plastic or paper. In fact, it’s much stickier than joint compound, but then, why would I be using joint compound on plaster walls (Wink: Gary)


After I’m finished I pull up the cardboard and then once over with the shop-vac. I’ll put down more cardboard for the finish coat.


Next up: The Finish Coat

More Plaster Confusion

The place I buy my plaster from is essentially a brickyard. They sell other things besides bricks, but most everything is brick or masonry related. Most of their business goes to trades people and they aren’t really set up to handle a brisk retail business.

When I go to buy the plaster I pull up to a small cinder block office building, and go in and tell a woman I need some plaster. She gets on an intercom and calls out to the yard that a customer is coming for plaster. She then tells me to drive to the second warehouse and someone will meet me there.

I drive through the gate and back to the second warehouse where two bored looking young men are leaning against pallets of different masonry products. There are a dozen different products in 50 and 80 pound bags on all of the different pallets. I tell them I want 3 Structo-Lite and 3 Diamond Finish plaster. There are no prices and none of the pallets are marked. They load up my truck and write up a tag. I then drive back to the cinderblock warehouse where the woman fills in the prices and totals, and I pay her.

I don’t remember what I got three years ago when I did my first plaster work in the upstairs bathroom. That room came out great and I had few problems. Then 2 years ago I did the kitchen and it didn’t go as smoothly. Some of the problems, which I won’t go in to, were unrelated to the plaster, but in general, it just didn’t go as smooth.



When I did the kitchen I bought the product in the picture above. It is the same as in the Worley PFD file. It is Structo-Lite Pre-Mixed Perlited Gypsum Plaster. Perlite is a volcanic mineral that has the interesting property that when it’s heated to 1600 degrees it pops like popcorn. It expands to 20 times it’s original size and is a common filler in masonry products. I still had most of one bag left over from the kitchen, and I was planning on using it up this time.

When I went to get more plaster this time I went through the same routine at the brickyard only this time they gave me a different product, or at least I think they might have. Below is what I got this time. It’s called Structo-Lite Base Coat. The ingredients are the same (Plaster of Paris and Expanded Perlite), but it seems to be a slightly different product.



Maybe it’s just my imagination, but this Base Coat Structo-Lite seems to be easier to mix and does not set up as quickly. After I finished my first bag of the of the Base Coat I got the old bag of pre-mixed perlited plaster and started mixing it in with the other type. I used 1/3 of the old and 1/3 of the new and 1/3 of the diamond finish plaster for the brown coat. Immediately I began to have the same problems I had in the kitchen. It’s just harder to work with.

After a few batches with the old Sturcto-Lite I decided it wasn’t worth it and I would just throw it away rather than deal with the problems it caused. The trouble is, I now don’t have enough plaster to finish the room. Also, the brickyard is only open Monday through Friday. My choices are to wait until Monday to finish, or muddle through with the old plaster I don’t like.

I’ve decided to use it anyway so I can finish up this weekend. I got about 4/5th of the way around the room when I realized I would need to use the old Structo-Lite. I had been at it for several hours today, and I decided to wait and finish up tomorrow. There is nothing worse than running in to problems at the end of the day. I’ll just start in fresh tomorrow and finish the room. I have a half of bag of the old and a half of bag of the new, so I'll just mix them together and hope for the best. I should be able to get the brown coat finished and start the finish coat tomorrow.

Tomorrow I’ll post lots of pictures and more tips & tricks I’ve discovered.

Finally, Plaster.

I’ve got walls! It feels good too. I got the scratch coat on all the bathroom walls today. It took about 3 hours. I think I could have done it in under 2 if I had someone to mix plaster while I troweled it on.

There was nothing too exciting about the plastering today. It went well. I did notice a few things that might be helpful to any would-be plasterers out there. In the great Plaster Repair PDF made by Dave from The Worley Place, he says to mix the plaster to a consistency of “Cake Batter but just a tad soupy”. I found this difficult to imagine because I’m not a baker. What is the consistency of cake batter? I made the first few batches of scratch coat too soupy. This was one of the reasons I think my Keys were so large.

I tried to come up with a better way to describe it. For me, I like it to be the consistency of warm peanut butter. That’s sounds good to me, but what if you’re allergic to peanuts, you’re probably thinking, “Warm peanut butter!? What the hell does that look like?” I ran in to similar problems with other analogies for consistency.

Soft shoe polish: shoe polish allergies
Soft serve ice cream: lactose intolerant
Squished cockroach innards: cockroach innards allergies

The list goes on. No matter what the analogy, someone will be left out. Then as I was mixing up a perfect batch of plaster the perfect analogy came to me as if by some unseen force. As I was mixing the plaster with my little 2-inch wide trowel, I thought to myself, “Wow, this is just a perfect batch of plaster”. As I scraped the bottom once more with the trowel I noticed how the deep valley I created in the pail looked kind of like when Charlton Heston parted the Red Sea in the movie The Ten Commandments. That’s when it came to me. This is the analogy everyone will understand. I mean, I’m an atheist and I’ve seen that scene dozens of time. It’s part of the collective consciousness.

So when you’re mixing your plaster for the scratch coat get it to where you can “Part The Red Sea” with your trowel and have smooth sides. The sides of the "sea" should be smooth, and maybe sag just a hair. If they flop in too much, the mix is too wet. If you get any cracks or breaks, the mix is too dry. Go Unto Thee And Be Like Moses...Or Charlton Heston, Which Ever Works Best. {Said in a loud, booming voice}.

Other helpful tips: Don’t put the pail of plaster at the base of the ladder where you can step in it. I’m not going to say how I know this is a good tip, you're going to have to trust me on this one. Also, don’t wear expensive Italian loafers when plastering. Trust me on this one as well.

And one last thought on the origins of plaster. I can’t shake the train of thought about how and when gypsum plaster became the preferred method to lime and sand plaster. It’s easy to see how drywall supplanted them all. It’s a quicker method. Quicker does not necessarily mean better, it’s just quicker. And for a professional, the quicker you can work, the more money you can make. That’s easy to see. There seems to be little difference in the methods for the two types of plaster, though. So why the switch. Then it dawned on me: Marketing! The great un-equalizer.

I’m sure that’s the missing link. US Gypsum had a product that they wanted to move. Plasterers that used lime plaster did not buy US Gypsum plaster. It was probably through a series of clever marketing campaigns, discounted merchandise to get shelf space, and maybe some threats and intimidation that they were able to get there product in to the hands of more and more plasters. Lime was used in enough of the other building trades that the use of lime in plaster could have lost the focus of the lime producers for a short enough period that the switch was made among plasterers, and even more importantly, those that sold products to plasterers. Or maybe the lime producers were cocky and assumed they could never lose the market. A fatal mistake for many industries though out the ages.

The old saying goes, Build a better mouse trap and the world will beat a path to your door. A modern twist on that could be, Market your mouse trap better, and you can beat your own path.

Tomorrow: The Brown Coat

Still More on Plaster

This is from the book Victorian Interior Decoration 1830 to 1900

Painting walls or ceilings in the 19th Century required a hard finished surface or stuccoed wall, built up of 3 coats of plaster, with the final coat plaster of Paris, creating a perfectly smooth surface. New walls had to dry, or “season” for a year before being painted in oils; otherwise they would absorb the oil as they dried, giving an unsatisfactory, mottled finish. When the walls were ready the painter applied an average of 5 coats of paint, each composed of lead, pigments, and oil. The final coat was often thinned with turpentine to reduce the gloss.

Unlike oils, distemper paint, an opaque water color paint made from tempera, could be applied immediately to any newly plastered wall or ceiling – there was no need to wait for the surface to cure – and could also be applied to walls finished more cheaply in lime and sand. The American name for distemper paint was calcimine (or “kalsomine”). Distemper – calcimine – is closely related to “whitewash”, a finish based on whiting (finely ground chalk) and a solution of water, salt, and lime. The term whitewash should not be taken literally since coloring agents could be added to the mixture.

Distemper and whitewash had several advantages over oil-based paints. Because they were water based they were far less expensive. They could be applied immediately to new walls, and their drying time was rapid. They were relatively odorless. As they were fairly easy to work with, a skilled painter was not required to apply them. Critics also praised the flat or matte finish they produced. Because they could be applied to new hard-finished walls, they were often used as a temporary first coat.

The book I got that from breaks down the Victorian era by period, with each period usually separated in to decades. The above is from the first chapter, which is 1830 to 1850. It does seem that lime and gypsum were not completely exclusive, but were used together. According to that, the lime and sand plaster was used for the scratch and brown coats, and then the gypsum based plaster of Paris was used as the finish coat. It still indicates that walls needed a year to cure, even though the Preservation Brief says gypsum plaster cures in 3 weeks and that was one of the advantages over lime. More contradictions.

I found this line interesting:

distemper paint…could also be applied to walls finished more cheaply in lime and sand.

So it looks like maybe the Petch family took the cheap route and did not finish the walls with the gypsum based plaster of Paris finish coat. This kind of made sense, since most of the walls were papered. Only the kitchen and bathroom did not have wallpaper. The kitchen did have an 18-inch boarder, but the wall between the beadboard and boarder were “painted” plaster. Painted is in quotes because it seems it may have been distemper. Perhaps gypsum plaster was hard to get here, and if you’re going paper, why go to the trouble and expense to acquire it and apply it.

Also, when I moved the wall back in the bathroom and discovered the original “painted” plaster – it was a light blue color that I tried to duplicate – I always thought it looked odd. It looked more like the plaster was tinted blue, rather than a blue oil paint applied. The color was only on the surface, though. I now think this was distemper and not paint. I now wish I had repaired the original finished lime and sand coat and painted with distemper. Oh, well.

Oh, and the answer to yesterday’s question, “When was sheetrock invented” is, June 11, 1912. At least that’s the earliest patent date I have on the sheetrock that use used in my house in the late teens or 20s. When they added the bathroom to the kitchen they used sheetrock. On the back of each piece was a sticker with instructions for storing and hanging the sheetrock. At the bottom are a series of patent dates and the earliest one is June 11, 1912.

More Thoughts On Plaster

Correct me if I’m wrong, and this time I mean it.

I’ve been peiceing together information on plaster and drywall over the last few years. A bit of it is because I’m curious about different construction techniques, but mainly because I wanted to try and use historically correct building methods in the restoration of the house.

Getting information about plaster repair was not easy when I first started working on The Petch House. I didn’t even know there was more than one type of plaster. As I said yesterday, Dave from The Worley Place supplied me with very good information on the use of Gypsum Plaster. From what I’ve been able to gather, the two basic types of plaster are Gypsum and Lime. So the question is, why was one preferred over the other?

From an old house prospective, the Gypsum plaster seems to be the newer method for wall plastering, while the Lime plaster seems to be the older method. Plaster of Paris is gypsum plaster, and the ancient Egyptians, and many other cultures have used gypsum plaster for thousands of years. There is nothing new about gypsum plaster.

There is nothing new about lime based plaster either, from what I can tell. It seems to go back thousands of years as well. I assume the method for creating lime for plaster is the same as quicklime for lime mortar. Bare with me, I’m no chemists, so I’m sure this is over-simplified. Anyway, you take lime stone and cook it in a kiln to burn off the carbon dioxide. This creates what is known as Quicklime or Burnt Lime. Adding water to quicklime starts another process which I guess sort of reverses the process the lime stone went through in the kiln. Simply put, the water starts a chemical reaction in which the lime gets hard again.

The process for turning raw gypsum in to plaster is similar, from what I’ve been able to tell. I tried to figure out why one was used over the other. I thought maybe it was regional. If an area had a lot of lime stone and kilns near by maybe they used lime plaster, and if you had a source of gypsum you used gypsum plaster.

I know that there is both a source for gypsum and limestone in California, and I also know that there were many lime kilns in central California at the turn of the century. When I lived in Santa Cruz I would go hiking in the local mountains and there were a few old lime kilns still up in the mountains. They were crude structures built up against a small cliff.



In So. California there is Plaster City which is a source of gypsum plaster, which I assume has been an active source for a very long time. Given the amount of commerce going up and down the coast by ship it seems that either could be a source of plaster for my house. So why did they use lime instead of gypsum? Also, why were some houses skim coated with a finish coat and others were not.

My walls don’t have what you would think of as a finish skim coat of plaster. There may have been a scratch and a brown coat, but really, it looks the same all the way through for the most part. The only difference I can tell about the surface of the plaster, and what’s behind it, is that I never see any animal hair on the surface. Maybe it was skim coated, but there is definitely sand in the skim coat. It is not the smooth, white skim coat one normally associates with later plaster jobs.

If you have sandy plaster walls, then it’s lime based. Even if it’s smooth on top, that may just be a skim coat of plaster (lime or gypsum) without sand. Why gypsum plaster wasn’t applied to more walls in 19th century homes, I can’t say. Or maybe it was and I’m just not aware of it. From my limited perspective, it seems that plaster walls in 19th century homes were largely lime based horse hair plaster, while gypsum based plaster became more and more popular in the early 20th century. I could be wrong.

The lime based plaster is usually referred to as “Horse Hair” plaster, but it was not limited to just the use of horse hair. The hair in the plaster acts as a binding agent to hold everything together. At some point drywall, also known as sheetrock, became the predominant method for finishing walls in a house. I can’t say exactly when sheetrock got it’s start, but I do know when the first US patents for sheetrock were obtained by the US Gypsum Co.

And that will be today’s poll question.

When was sheetrock invented?
	Before 1860
	1860 to 1870
	1871 to 1880
	1881 to 1890
	1891 to 1900
	1901 to 1910
	1911 to 1920
	1921 to 1930
	1931 to 1940
	After 1940
Free polls from Pollhost.com

Edit

Seconds after I posted this I had a thought. Maybe it was the rise of the automobile that lead to the demise of horse hair plaster. With fewer and fewer horses in the city there would be fewer places to obtain horse hair. Without a reliable supply of hair as a binding agent you would need to switch to gypsum plaster.

Horse hair plaster literally went out with the buggy whip.

The Worley Way

When I bought The Petch House I knew I wanted to restore the plaster, but I had no idea how to do it. I went to a few on-line forums dealing with old houses and I started asking questions. Eventually, I found a guy named Dave at The Old House Journal forum and he gave me some information about plastering. Dave had a house he called The Worley Place. The Worley Place is a beautiful 1890s Victorian and Dave was doing some amazing restoration work on it.

Dave had been taught how to plaster by an old-time plasterer. At first I only got real basic information but I continued to pester him for details. Eventually Dave made up a PDF file with step-by-step instructions on how to plaster. He emailed it to me, or maybe posted it on his web site, I don’t recall, but he did say I could pass the information along to anyone that needed it.

Dave sort of stopped hanging out on the forum, and eventually even his web site disappeared for a while. I posted the link to the PDF file several times for people over at The Old House Web forum. The editors of The Old House Web saw it and asked if I wanted to write an on-line article about plaster repair. I explained that the PDF wasn’t mine, and I didn’t feel right about taking credit for it. At the time, I tried to get a hold of Dave, but his site was not up anymore, so the whole thing fizzled out.

Now that I’m plastering again, I thought I’d make the PDF available to anyone who wants it. Oddly enough, I made another attempt to find The Worley Place web site and it’s up and running again. I didn’t bother to try and contact Dave. It was many years ago that he made the PDF file and I’m not sure he’d remember who I was. I think I’ll send him a link to this post, though.

Anyway, below is the PDF file. This is for gypsum plaster repair, as opposed to the old lime and sand based "Horse Hair" plaster. I have used this method for repairing horse hair plaster, and talked to others who have, and the method works fine. Bearfort of The Carley Brook Farm has rediscovered the lost art of lime and sand horse hair plaster, so maybe if I keep pestering him, he will divulge the secrets on how to do that. After I plaster the bathroom with gypsum plaster I want to learn Horse Hair plaster and use that method in the rest of the house.

The Worley Place Plaster Repair PDF

All Keyed Up

For those of you not familiar with it, a plaster wall relies on the plaster that smooshes through the lath to keep it on the wall. The strips of plaster that hang off the back side of the lath are called “Keys”. The most common reason for plaster failing in an old house is broken keys.

Today I started in on the plaster in the bathroom. I started on the wall with the door because it will be the last place you look when you enter the room. It went pretty well. It took me a few minutes to sort of get use to the whole hawk/trowel relationship again. I was also pressing too hard at first as I was applying the first coat of plaster. It was like I was treating the lath more like a cheese grater than wooden plaster lath. I got the hang of it after a few minutes, though.





Above is a front and back shot of the door wall. You can see how the plaster oozes through the lath to form the keys. Once it sets up, those keys will keep the plaster on the wall. I think I’m still pressing a little too hard. The keys don’t need to be that large, and it’s just a waste of plaster.

The front view represents 2 coats. If I remember correctly, the first coat is called the scratch coat and the second coat is called the brown coat. The scratch coat is coarse plaster that forms the keys. The brown coat is put on after the scratch coat is hard, but before it completely dries. I waited over night to put on the brown coat. The final coat will be the finish coat and that is just a very thin skim coat to smooth any imperfections and give the surface a nice smooth finish. If done properly, there is very little sanding involved. It remains to be seen how “properly” I’m able to do it.

I have come up with a different system over my kitchen plaster debacle. When I plastered the kitchen I made large batches of plaster in a black plastic tub that was about 2X3 feet. This time I’m using a much smaller tub and I mix smaller batches at a time. Hardly the way a professional would do it, but as we all know, I’m not a professional. There is no point in me trying to act like one if I know I’m not. Right?

By making smaller batches I don’t feel as rushed. When you know you have 20 pounds of plaster slowly getting hard in the tub there is an impetus to get to it. I now make just enough to fill the hawk twice. It’s more work, but I get better results, or at least I hope I will. So far, I’m not completely disgusted with my work, so I’m off to a good start.

The other benefit to making smaller batches is that I don’t have as much waste – there was a lot with the kitchen – and I don’t have small, dried chunks of plaster mixing in with the new stuff. Small, dried chunks of plaster getting mixed in with the fresh plaster caused me endless problems with the kitchen. You’re going along, just as fine as you please, getting a nice smooth wall, and then you get one of these destructo-chunks on the trowel and it just ruins all of your work by digging a gash in the fresh plaster. That didn’t happen once today.

This is pretty much as far as I’m going to get for a week or so. I’m going to be shutting down operations tomorrow, as I’m getting ready to play tourist director for some visiting family members. I wonder if they know how to plaster. Hmmm, maybe as part of the activities for the week I could sneak in a day of plastering demonstrations. I think they’d find it fascinating, don’t you?

Tile’s Here!….Again

The second, and hopefully last {Grrrr!} batch of tile arrived late yesterday. I’m going to wait until Saturday to finish the back wall and replace the missing tile. I’m still in full Lath Mode and I don’t want to disrupt the progress.

I’ve completed two walls, and then I have most of a third wall done. There is about a 1X5 foot section at the top of the sink wall that still needs lath. After that, I just have the door wall, and since it is mostly door, there is not a whole lot of lath to put on.

I can only imagine what it must have been like to put this stuff up in a whole house. I’m sure the guys who did the actual nailing of the lath to the wall must have gotten super fast at it. I’m sure they worked in teams, with the Master Lather doing the nailing, and the apprentices cutting and handing lath do them. There may have even been a third level of gophers who hauled lath from a delivery point outside in to the house.

Even though it’s a lot of work, I can see where a proficient team could make short work of a house. A small house could probably been done in 1 to 2 days, and a larger house in less than a week. I can also see why sheetrock became so popular with installers. I wonder if the same people who put the lath up were the ones who plastered. Were they so specialized that it was two different trades, or did one crew do everything?

Thinkin’ Old Timey Like

Still no tile. UPS usually comes late to my house, so it still could show up today. I’m really itching to get the tile finished. Looking at the half wall is starting to bug me. Not to mention my one missing tile on the other wall.

To keep the project moving forward I started installing lath today. This will be my 3rd plastering job and will determine if my success with the first room was a fluke or not. The upstairs bathroom was my first attempt at plastering and it came out great. The kitchen, my second room, gave me more trouble. Both rooms were a mix of new and old plaster, and some major and minor repairs to the old plaster. This room is all from scratch, so it should be very interesting.

I’m removing the lath from the ceiling of the butler’s pantry and laundry room to use in the bathroom. The laundry room will be a redwood paneled ceiling (Don’t get too excited. It’s not nearly as fancy as it sounds) and the butler’s pantry will be a tin ceiling, so they won’t need the lath.

I immediately ran in to a few problems. First, the nails. They used an inch and a quarter wire nail in 1895 to put the lath up. All nails are either cut or wire nails. Cut nails are the old style flat iron nails. Modern wire nails can be broken down further to Box, Common, Casing, or Finish, and then you have Brads.

The modern equivalent of an 1895 wire lath nail is sort of like a panel nail (small finish nail). It is very thin but has a standard looking head on it. It's like a fat brad with a large head. They sell them at Ace and they are $2.99 for a box of 50! I would probably end up paying nearly $40 in nails to get the lath up. Ain’t gunna happen.

They also had panel nails that were only 99 cents for the same sized box. The panel nails are not quite as thin as the wire nail, and they have a slight head on them, more like a finish nail. I was standing there in Ace looking at these when it dawned on me that I could just use my pneumatic brad nailer. I already have a box of 2-inch slight head brads. It was another one of those “slap forehead” moments.

I was concerned that the brads might not be enough to hold the lath on the wall, but they are plenty. It takes several good tugs to rip the lath off the wall. It is about the same as ripping off the original lath, and I won’t be doing a ceiling, just the walls above the tile.

The other small issue I discovered today was that when I put in the outlet and the water pipe for the toilet I was thinking like a sheet rock hanger and not like a lath hanger. I’m going to need to add a little more framing around these two things.



Maybe you can see in the picture that there is nothing to secure the lath too around these two items. In the center is the hole for the medicine cabinet, and then to the left there is an outlet and to the right is the water source for the toilet. I need to have something just to the left of both of those items to nail the lath to. It’s not the end of the world.

I’m going to go buy plaster on Thursday and hopefully start slathering it on the walls this weekend. It is a very big deal for me. Not just because I’m going to see if I really can plaster, but it will really define the space. Nothing says improvement like covering up framing.