Today we are back to our plaster restoration project in Cheektowaga, We started this project 2 weeks ago, the home had some ugly water damage due to an ice dam (a common thread this year). After the plaster was repaired, we have to wait for a minimum of 7 days prior to painting the new plaster. Its about the only downside to traditional plaster repair.
The homeowner asked asked us to skim coat the ceiling. Prior to leaving the first time, we skim coated the ceiling the first coat, and today we did the second pass on the living room ceiling as well as do some more wall work.
We are painting the walls, so all damage has to be fixed first. At Carrigan Painting, we do not paint over damage.. At the same time, we are on a tight schedule this week and need to get the job done, so to help move things along, we ran first coat of paint on the wall areas that were not waiting to dry.
Tomorrow we will sand the ceiling, sand the patches that we did today, and then prime everything. After that, we will begin applying paint to all the large surfaces. Hopefully we will have this wrapped up tomorrow.
Update – Day 2: Well we didn’t finish. There were some areas we didn’t like and the ceiling needed to be skimmed a 3rd time. So we did that, then sanded the ceiling, and then painted the ceiling. We also spot primed the walls and painted the walls. Strangely, I only took this single photo… Must have been too busy working =)
Update – Day 3: All done. We painted the ceiling a second time and did a third coat on the upper part of the walls again. The cream color they chose for the living room didnt quite cover the tan. We used Behr ScuffDefense on the walls instead of Dyansty because it has much better abrasion resistance than Dynasty – (in my opinion). This living room is lived in.
And then of the rest of the room:
Some before and after photos:
Overall a good project, and a lot of work. We skim coated the ceiling 3x because we didn’t like the way it looked after the standard 2 coats. And the change of color took an extra coat of paint to cover. Its our policy, to never charge more if it takes longer than we anticipated. The results though are fantastic, and at the end of the day that is what matters.
Restoring water damaged plaster is always an adventure, since you never really know, just how big the patch will get. We enjoy these projects because the transformation after everything is painted and cleaned up is remarkable. If you home has water damage to its plaster, give us a call.
This job was part of an insurance claim. Since the beginning of 2026, we have noticed that homeowners insurance has been undervaluing restoration work like this by 40-90%! In this case, insurance quoted $1,700, but the total cost came to just shy of $4,000.
