There’s the idea that once you start renovating an old house to be prepared for tons of surprises. This weekend the plan was to start skimcoating the ceiling with limeplaster. Before we started, we did a few hours of prep. Last weekend I washed down the ceiling and walls with a mix of bleach and TSP. This time I’m doing a rinse with water and some Borax. I’m assuming the TSP and Borax washes are all compatible with lime plaster since they are all akalines. Also should help retard mold. As we’re rinsing we check a few more of the spongy areas and secure with plaster washers. Things are going fine till I hit an area near the light fixture. You can tell something is wrong when you are drilling into the plaster to probe for a lath and you aren’t hitting any solid wood. I find one spot to screw into and once the washer is secured, the surrounding plaster all crumbles. I start ripping things out and see the two laths running up to the light fixture are completely falling off the joist. The problem is that when the light fixture was installed the laths were cut from the other joist to fit the light fixture in. The one side of the laths were just dangling and eventually the weight of the plaster caused the laths to snap off from the joist. I need to regroup to figure out how to repair this issue and either way it requires a new scratch and brown coat which means no skimcoating the ceiling.

We change plans and move to fixing up any of the exposed lath on the walls. The walls are not as crucial in that most of the repairs are below where the beadboard will go, but I’d like to clean up some of the bare spots before the wood is installed.

Anywhere there is exposed lath, we apply some PlasterWeld around the edges to give the new plaster something to grip to. I’m not sure if this is needed, but in some cases the repairs are small enough that there’s no gaps between the laths that there won’t be any keys in the plaster. I would guess that the best solution would be to open up all of the plaster to get a gap between laths for a key, but I’m hoping PlasterWeld will do the job instead.

After all of the PlasterWeld is brushed around the repairs, we mix up some of Limeworks.us coarse base coat lime plaster. We also add some horsehair and then mist down all of the laths. These repairs will be the scratch coat so the goal is to push the plaster through the lath creating keys where possible. In the other cases, I’m hoping the PlasterWeld will do the job. After the plaster dries a little, we scratch the surface so the 2nd coat has something to grip to.