Plaster Repair near you

Older British buildings were plastered in lime, often with hair as reinforcement, over masonry or timber laths. Lime is comparatively soft and it lets moisture move through it and evaporate away. Modern work is generally gypsum: a backing or bonding coat where depth is needed, then a thin finish plaster trowelled up as it sets. Gypsum is harder, faster and entirely appropriate in a modern house, and it is the default almost everywhere now.

The failure people meet again and again is the two being mixed on a wall that needed the softer one. A hard, relatively impermeable repair set into soft lime on a solid wall gives the moisture nowhere to go, so it concentrates at the edges of the patch, and the repair either pushes off or drives the damage outwards into the surrounding plaster. This is why a sound instinct on an older property is to ask what the existing plaster is and what the plasterer proposes to repair it with, rather than assuming any plasterer will reach for the same bag.

Plaster gives plenty of notice before it lets go, and most of the signs are ones you can check yourself without doing any harm. The test that matters most is sound. Tap gently across the surface with your knuckles: sound plaster is dull and solid, while plaster that has separated from the wall or lost its key rings hollow. Map the hollow area and you have found the actual extent of the job, which is usually larger than the visible damage.

When plaster keeps failing in the same place, moisture is almost always the reason, and repairing the plaster without dealing with the moisture simply buys time. Government guidance on damp and mould in the home is a useful framework because it separates causes that look identical once they reach the plaster. Rising damp is described as moisture from the ground rising up through parts of the buildings in contact with the ground, and the guidance adds that it is usually found in older properties and is often misdiagnosed, which is worth holding onto when someone diagnoses it confidently from the doorstep.

Salt is what makes moisture damage persistent rather than merely inconvenient. Groundwater and some building materials carry soluble salts, and where water has been moving through a wall over a long period those salts accumulate in the plaster. They draw moisture from the air and keep the surface damp long after the original source has been fixed, which is why a patch can stay dark, or bloom white, on a wall that genuinely is no longer wet. A plasterer who tells you a salt-contaminated area has to be hacked off rather than skimmed over is describing the standard remedy, not padding the job.

The practical order of work follows from this. Find and fix the source, allow the wall a realistic drying period, and only then replaster. A wall that is still drying will reject almost any finish, and there is no way to shorten the process that does not simply move the failure into the future.

There are three honest answers and they suit different walls. A localised patch is right for isolated damage where the surrounding plaster sounds solid and the wall is being redecorated anyway. Re-skimming the whole wall or ceiling suits a surface carrying a long history of small repairs, because a single continuous finish coat replaces a map of patches that will otherwise show up whenever light rakes across it from a window. Hacking off and replastering from the background is for plaster that has failed comprehensively, that is salt-contaminated, or that is coming off in areas rather than in patches.

Cost over five years rather than cost on the day is the right basis for choosing. Patching a wall that is 40 percent hollow is a false economy, because the next patch is already forming. Equally, stripping a sound wall because one corner failed is destructive, dusty and irreversible, and in an older property it disturbs every historic layer on the way down. The compromise that often works is patching the failed areas and then re-skimming the whole surface, which keeps the original plaster where it is sound and still leaves one continuous face to decorate.

Plastering is not a licensed trade in the United Kingdom. There is no statutory register a plasterer must appear on and no licence to produce, which is a genuine contrast with work the law does restrict: HSE requires a licensed contractor for the higher-risk asbestos work such as removing sprayed coatings, work that may disturb pipe lagging, and work involving loose fill insulation. So the checks on a plasterer are yours to make rather than a regulator's: public liability insurance, a written scope, and work you can go and look at. What is regulated is how the work is done, through health and safety law, and whether the building itself is protected.

Protection is the part owners of period property most often miss. Section 7 of the Planning (Listed Buildings and Conservation Areas) Act 1990 provides that no person shall execute or cause to be executed any works for the demolition of a listed building or for its alteration or extension in any manner which would affect its character as a building of special architectural or historic interest, unless the works are authorised under section 8. That covers interiors, not only frontages, so stripping historic lime plaster or removing a run cornice in a listed building is a matter for the local planning authority before it is a matter for a plasterer.

Where plastering is one stage of something structural, the approval regime depends on which part of the UK you are in. In England and Wales, GOV.UK states that you must check if you need approval before you construct or change buildings in certain ways, with approval coming from a building control body that is either your local authority's building control department or a private registered building control approver. Scotland runs a separate system: a building warrant gives you legal permission to carry out building work, is needed for work including building or removing load-bearing walls and converting a loft or garage into a room, is assessed by your local council's building standards department, and is valid for 3 years from the date it was granted. Northern Ireland works to the Building Regulations (Northern Ireland) 2012, whose parts include Part D on structure and Part E on fire safety.

A good repair is built in layers rather than filled in one go. Loose material is cut back to a firm edge, because nothing will bond to plaster that is already letting go. The background is prepared and controlled for suction so it does not pull the water out of the fresh coat before it can set. Depth is made up with a backing coat, reinforcement goes in where the repair crosses a junction or a change of background, and only then does a thin finish coat go on, worked and trowelled as it sets. The single most common shortcut in British plastering is finish plaster used at a depth it was never designed for, and it announces itself within a season as cracking and hollowness.

Dust is the part that affects everyone living in the house, and it is not merely unpleasant. HSE states that regularly breathing construction dust can cause diseases like lung cancer, asthma, Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease and silicosis, and that over 500 construction workers are believed to die from exposure to silica dust every year. Cutting into the masonry behind the plaster is the serious exposure rather than the plastering itself, because HSE notes that silica is a major constituent of construction materials such as bricks, tiles, concrete and mortar, and that dust is generated during common tasks including cutting, drilling, grinding and polishing. Expect the working area to be sealed off and expect water suppression or on-tool extraction, rather than a brush and an open window.

Old paint deserves one question before any sanding begins. Government guidance states that lead paint was common before the 1970s, that it has not been used after 1992, and that exposure is only likely if the paint is deliberately removed or sanded during redecoration. Because plaster repairs so often run into painted skirting boards, architrave and window reveals, raise it at quoting stage in a pre-1992 property. Where an employer is doing the work, regulation 5 of the Control of Lead at Work Regulations 2002 requires a suitable and sufficient assessment of the risk before carrying out work liable to expose employees to lead.

New plaster is not finished when it stops feeling wet. It darkens and lightens in patches as it dries, and it is ready to decorate only when the colour is even all over with no darker areas remaining. How long that takes depends on the thickness, the background, the ventilation and the weather rather than on any fixed number of days, and a plasterer who gives you an exact figure without seeing the wall is guessing. Keep the heating gentle and steady and the air moving; forcing it dry with a heater pointed at the wall is how a good finish ends up crazed.

The first coat onto new plaster is thinned rather than full strength, so it soaks in and binds instead of sitting on the surface as a film. Skipping that step is the standard reason emulsion peels off new plaster in sheets some months later, and it is invisible on the day the work finishes.

To compare plasterers, LokalMatch lets you set the job out once. Describe the room, the age of the property, what the wall is made of if you know, how much of it sounds hollow, and whether damp, a textured coating or a listed interior is involved, and matched plasterers covering your postcode contact you directly. The professionals pay for the requests they receive. LokalMatch does not carry out plastering, does not set prices and does not vet, rank or recommend any plasterer, so compare how each one proposes to deal with the background and the cause before you compare anything else.