Replastering? Don’T Even Think About It

As much as tearing down walls might be an attractive thing to do in personal relationships, it’s a bloody awful job when it comes to home remodeling.

Generally speaking, if you are a typical home repair novice, taking out a wall is not a good idea, in that the wall might be holding your roof up. But even if your project isn’t of that broad a scope, it’s not a bad idea to leave your walls alone as much as possible.

However, a very typical home repair scenario involves the damaged surface of an interior wall, particularly in many of the pre-World War II homes in our area. These walls were usually surfaced with lath - a network of small thin boards nailed to your wall studs - and plaster, a mortarlike substance that adheres to the lath. And the plaster doesn’t last forever. In time, say 50 to 75 years or so, the plaster begins to get crumbly and can fall out of walls and ceilings in great chunks.

Repairing plaster is tough nowadays. Working with plaster was an art back in the ‘20s and ‘30s. But the advent of sheetrock largely sent those artisans off toward extinction and people with these rare skills are hard to find, and expensive.

So when you are confronted with damaged and crumbling plaster, you have few options other than to replace the wall with sheetrock. And usually, even if a limited part of the wall is damaged, the best idea is to redo the whole wall. That’s because, if you’ll notice, the intact plaster around the damaged area will be pulling away from the lath. And if you remove that plaster, you’ll usually find that the new edge of the good plaster will also start pulling away from the lath.

If this isn’t the case, you can cut a square section out of the plaster, and if it was originally installed by a real craftsman, you can patch in a sheet of half-inch sheetrock, tape and mud the seams, and repaint the wall. Most often, though, the sheetrock will be slightly thicker or slightly thinner than the original plaster, leaving you with an uneven and obvious patch.

So usually it’s all or nothing.

A good option is to just slap up the sheetrock over the old layer of lath and plaster. This approach does create a few finishing problems.

First, you’ll need a good electronic stud finder to locate your wall studs so you are sure you are putting your drywall screws in the right spot. If you go into a stud, you are much less likely to drill into a pipe or an electrical wire. Just be careful in the vicinity of light switches and wall sockets.

It’s a good idea to leave a light on, and something plugged in and running on the circuits you’re working around. That way, if you do put a screw into a wire, you’ll know right away just which screw was the offending projectile. And that’s a whole lot easier than turning on the switch after the whole job is done and discovering that one of the several hundred screws you’ve just put into your wall is the one you’ve got to take out.

You don’t have to leave anything on to deal with the plumbing. If you hit a pipe, you’ll know soon enough.

The other problem will occur around windows and doors. You’ll want to pull off all window and door frames and frame right up to the edge of the opening. This means, though, that when you put the door and window frames back on, you will have a half-inch gap between the facings and the frame coverings. with a rough sheetrock edge showing through.

In newer windows, you can just replace the frame coverings with wood that is a half-inch wider than the original covering and stain it to match the rest of the woodwork. In older double-sash windows with weight counterbalances, you’ll have to come up with some kind of thin wooden strip to cover the cap. Make it wide enough to overlap from the facing to the frame covering and stain it to match the rest of the wood.

Since almost all of the older homes around here were built with 2-by-4s, that means you have to fur out those walls by 2 inches and put in new insulation. If you think dealing with old plaster is a mess, wait until you confront the itchy, smelly, dusty ground-up paper chunks that serve as the insulation for exterior walls in most older homes.

Once you’ve got the sheetrock up and your trimming problems figured out, then all you have to do is tape and mud your sheetrock.

If you are new at this and it’s a wall you ever want anyone else to see, you are advised to hire someone else and watch them do it.