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Saturday, May 29, 2010

My Bad

I made some really good progress on the foyer. I got all of the grooves ground out. I secured any loose plaster with plaster washers and construction adhesive. All of the nails are pulled and the stage is set for plaster. I even made a dump run to get rid of all of the old plaster. I’m going to do a little more clean up and by the end of the day today I will be ready to trowel on some plaster. There is just one little problem….

I forgot to buy plaster – Doh!

Not only did I forget to buy it but I made a trip to Hansel Materials on Wednesday to pick up a gallon of plaster weld. I was within 100 feet of pallets full of plaster and I didn’t even think to buy any. It is really astounding. Sadly, they are not open on weekends, so I’m screwed.

I think it is partly psychosomatic. Some where in side of me I really didn’t want to do any plastering this weekend. Really though, I think it has more to do with how I feel about this project. As I said in another post, it is the smallest interior project I’ve done. I do have almost a full bag of Structo-Lite in the garage, and the last time I ordered finish plaster I bought 5 bags and I still have 3 of those left. I just wasn’t really thinking that I would need more.

Obviously I need more plaster. Even though this is mostly a skim-coat job, the sections that need to be built up from scratch are big enough that one partial bag will never be enough. I need 3 more bags, easy. So I’ll do what I can tomorrow with the partial bag and then get more next week.

In the mean time I’ll enjoy the sun and The Big Race. For the glory!

3 comments:

Joosmeister said...

What plaster do you use for your finish coat? I have tried joint compound but the slightest amount of water and it peels away.

Greg said...

I use Diamond Finish Plaster, but even with that I've experienced the same peel away issue. For me it was in my kitchen and I narrowed the problem down to the original paint that was used.

Now, regardless of what was the original finish, I use a masonry adhesive on the plaster before putting on the skim coat. I don't do this with new plaster. Only when skim-coating over old plaster.

There are products like Plaster Weld, WeldCrete, and others. I used WeldCrete last time, because it was the only product available locally. It rolls on like watery paint. It sticks to the old plaster and then the new skim-coat sticks to it.

It worked very well, but I did experience a problem with the WeldCrete beading up on some areas of the old plaster that had glossy paint on it. It beads up like water on an oily surface. There is some flat white paint in the stair hall and I'm not sure how the WeldCrete is going to react to it.

Stay tuned.

Greg

Joosmeister said...

Thanks Greg. When our plaster fails, I pull all the crumbling stuff off the wall, sometimes back down to the lathe. In our basement I've had to tear it back to bare concrete... so I don't think I'll have the paint problem.

The basement is my problem area with dampness seeping through the concrete onto the brown coat. The original plaster seems to have held up fairly well to this dampness but using joint compound was a bad idea.

This second try I'm going to try to find masonry adhesive like WeldCrete as a glue... great idea! I'll try to skim with "real" plaster perhaps over the top.