Even a 125 Year Old Plaster Ceiling can be Beautiful

Plaster Ceiling Restoration is our specialty. Below are some videos of our work. Out of all the professional painting contractors in Western New York, we are the only one providing traditional plaster restoration services.

Below we detail how we take old neglected ceilings, and restore them to their former glory!

We covered the floors with heavy canvas drop cloths, and put up plastic from the floor to the ceiling in both rooms.

I knocked a small hole in the ceiling using a hatchet, and this is what I was presented with. Immediately I knew this wouldn’t be a normal plaster crack repair.

We set up the baker scaffold, and the baby baker to make this work easier. These are 10 foot ceilings.

Most of this came off by hand. Plaster cracks on a ceiling are sometimes a bit more involved once you get into the repair.

I wasn’t expecting this much to come off, so we ran out of metal lath.. So tomorrow, we will install the rest of the metal lath, and then apply the basecoat plaster to the metal lath, then finish the patches with plaster.

The basecoat plaster is not supposed to be smooth. It is designed the be finished rough, this allows the finish coat to “key into” the basecoat and results in a more durable finish.

Day 2
Today we brought in more metal lath and basecoat plaster. We hung the metal lath and then applied the basecoat. While that set up, we broke for lunch.

Notice our edges are bit messy, we skim coated the ceiling due to it being wallpapered at some point in the past, and had that painted wallpaper look to it. So I wasn’t overly concerned about the edges.

But typically the edges of a plaster patch are kept clean, because unlike drywall, we are replacing only the missing material.

I ran into a snag while preparing the basecoat for the finish. This happens some times. Using wire cutters, we cut off the excess metal lath, and then used a hatchet to bend the remaining “nubs” back up so we could finish the ceiling with out issue.

Then applied the finish coat to both rooms.

The brown areas in the photo above, is where the wallpaper came off. Plaster is the wrong material to repair such damage. We skim coated the ceilings, so this area was covered through that process.

The finished plaster is shiny because we polish it with our finishing trowels. Its too hard to be workable at this point. We add water at certain stages of the finishing to prolong the setting, as well as, as a lubricant to polish the plaster as it goes hard.

Once the plaster finish is mixed, you have limited time to complete your work, or it goes hard. There is no sanding out the imperfections later. Chip it off with a hatchet is about your only options. So this can be very labor intensive.

Below are a couple of videos of me finishing these patches.

Day 3: We skim coated both ceilings with drywall compound due to the wallpaper that is on the ceiling. It created the weird painted 500x wallpaper texture. Being that our plaster patches are nearly as smooth as glass, they would stand out like a sore thumb once the ceilings are painted.

Day 4
As you can see a lot of staining come through the drywall compound. Once the ceilings were sanded, we primed them both with Sherwin Williams Problock HS oil (about the only product we use of Sherwins..) Priming does two things. One, it seals in the stains and makes them go away. The first time. Two – it shows us the imperfections in our work, allowing us to repair those imperfections while still on site.

Day 5:
We are all done. It came out really well and looks fantastic!