The walls of any pre-war house are most likely wood lath like in this picture covered with 3 coats of plaster. The work took a long time and was very labor intensive. Not to mention it required a skilled plasterer to make sure the plaster was properly applied and the wall was smooth and level.
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. 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. And since this wall wasn’t applied wet like plaster it could be painted right away and thus got the nickname “drywall.”
A 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.
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.
All to often we see historic houses gutted to the studs to install new drywall to replace the “outdated” plaster. Sometimes the plaster has been neglected past the point of no return, but most times it can be repaired. Usually it’s torn out in the name of insulating the wall cavities. 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. 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
Here’s just a few of the benefits of having a real plaster wall to consider before you think about removing yours.
- Thicker walls mean better sound dampening.
- Thicker walls mean double the R-value of ordinary drywall.
- Wood lath serves to strengthen the wall by adding additional racking resistance.
- Plaster increases the historical authenticity and therefore resale value of a historic home.
- It’s already there! It’s always “greener” and cheaper to retain existing elements.
Hopefully, this has given you some things to think about when it comes to your plaster walls. 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.
Read the rest of the 5 Worst Mistakes of Historic Homeowners:
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5 Worst Mistakes of Historic Homeowners (Part 2 Floors) -
5 Worst Mistakes of Historic Homeowners (Part 3 Siding) -
5 Worst Mistakes of Historic Homeowners (Part 1 Windows) -
5 Worst Mistakes of Historic Homeowners (Part 5 The Details)
In my Chicago 1920s condo, we have drywall OVER lathe and plaster, a truly unholy marriage! So hard to get anything properly fastened in the walls.
Yes! Plaster, all the way! My husband thought I’d lost my mind. To him, the best thing to do was rip off the old 70s paneling (gross!) and then hang drywall OVER the plaster! I nearly fainted.
There are a couple rooms in this house where the plaster was apparently a bad mix. The scratch coat, which can be seen around some of our old door moldings, had reverted back to mostly sand and horsehair. One touch sent it crumbling.
Not to be dismayed, I fought for the plaster. Since I do about 98.9% of the labor around here, I won that argument. That happens a lot! He buys, and I work. Seems fair.
The first room was the master bedroom. There were areas popping loose from the lath because they keys were broken. Not shocking, since they’d nailed furring strips and paneling over it. In all areas besides the crumbling ones, I screwed the plaster back to the lath with plaster screws and washers, skimmed it with hot mud and fiberglass mesh, then skimmed it again. Hot mud wasn’t my first choice, but it worked really well. I’ve never mixed plaster, and I didn’t want to take a chance on my walls.
The fiberglass (A trick I learned from This Old House) worked brilliantly for strengthening the cracks. Five years later, and those walls are still beautiful. The hot mud and a wide mud knife left a nice sheen to the walls that looks for all the world like the surface is plaster. It took a while to get a feel for the technique, and it’s a bit labor-intensive, but there’s no way I would hang drywall anywhere that I had a choice.
Howdy just wanted to give you a quick heads up. The text in your content seem to be running off the screen in Safari.
I’m not sure if this is a formatting issue or something to do with web browser compatibility but I thought I’d post to let you
know. The layout look great though! Hope you get the problem fixed soon.
Many thanks
Thanks Elise. Editing and formatting is a full time job it seems.
I appreciate the heads up!