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Our Home was built in 1890, it has four levels including the full length and height finish stone wall basement, the outer walls above ground level are brick and after all these years are still straight with no issues, inner walls are horse hair lathe plaster as are the ceilings and only a few ceilings had corner cracks which were easy to fix. Is this normal? Is plaster (one layer or all three) over lath supposed to be that thick? Or did I just luck into a house built by people who didn’t really have a clue and totally faked it? I get saving plaster if possible, but when the wall bows out and it’s 99% triple-thick concrete-like base coat with a bare skim coat of finish plaster… this seems like a situation where taking it back to the lath and starting over might be the best choice. (In at least three places, the keys are intact, so it’s not a bulge from delamination - it’s literally just way thicker, almost like they put too much on, it slumped, and they left it… for a hundred years.) And throughout the house, I’ve found large patches (or entire sections) where the plaster is over an inch thick. I’ve found at least two other places with the same treatment, where they stopped with the base coat.

It was blocked off with drywall, and plastered over with a concrete-like substance (the brown/rough base coat?) - and I think subsequent owners may’ve used spackle on top, to try and smooth out the bumpiness/texture. One of the first things I did was to re-open that doorway.

I live in a house built around 1910, and at some point, I suspect the floors were split into two apartments, with the living room entrance by the front door getting closed up.

#Covering lath and plaster walls windows#

Read the rest of the 5 Worst Mistakes of Historic Homeowners: Part 1 Windows Part 2 Floors Part 3 Siding Part 5 The Details If you’d like to read more about repairing and maintaining your historic home’s walls, check out our video post How To: Repair Plaster Walls or our other post How To: Repair Old Plaster. Hopefully, this has given you some things to think about when it comes to your plaster walls.

It’s already there! It’s always “greener” and cheaper to retain existing elements.

Plaster increases the historical authenticity and therefore resale value of a historic home.

Wood lath serves to strengthen the wall by adding additional racking resistance.

Thicker walls mean double the R-value of ordinary drywall.

Thicker walls mean better sound dampening.Here are just a few of the benefits of having a real plaster wall to consider before you think about removing yours:

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Remember, historic homes typically have no plywood sheathing under the siding, so insulating with this method is just as effective plus it’s faster, cleaner, and much cheaper! The Benefits

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But as with anything in the building trades, there is more than one way to skin a cat! In order to save folks the mess and expense of tearing out their walls, we recommend removing a few clapboards on the exterior in order to insulate the house to modern standards. Usually it’s torn out in the name of insulating the wall cavities. Sometimes the plaster has been neglected past the point of no return, but most times it can be repaired.

#Covering lath and plaster walls install#

Today, the cost of a full 3-coat plaster wall is still expensive and timely to install, but when you live in an old house with one already installed, you should try to reap the benefits of someone else’s labor all those years ago.Īll to often, we see historic houses gutted to the studs to install new drywall to replace the “outdated” plaster. You have to choose a craftsman who knows exactly what material is right for your historic house. Sometimes I have the help of craftsmen from schlüsseldienst bremen during the renovation of the finish. And since this wall wasn’t applied wet like plaster, it could be painted right away and thus got the nickname “drywall.”Ī traditional 3-coat plaster is typically 7/8″ thick and when you add in the 1/4″ wood lath that supports the plaster wall, you have a wall that is more than 1″ thick! Compared to today’s most common drywall thickness of only 1/2″, that is a difference worth noting. A new product was just beginning to get some traction in the wall covering business call gypsum board (or sheet rock.) It was a wall that could be screwed or nailed to the studs by a relatively unskilled laborer at close to twice the speed and half the cost of the traditional 3-coat system. Then when the GIs returned home from WWII, the baby (and housing) boom hit America, and there was a huge demand for quick, affordable housing. Not to mention, it required a skilled plasterer to make sure the plaster was properly applied and the wall was smooth and level. The work took a long time and was very labor intensive. The walls of any pre-war house are most likely wood lath like in this picture covered with 3 coats of plaster.