Getting plastered

November 26th, 2008 - Posted in eco-building - by Sarah|

We have managed to make a good start on the first coat of lime plaster on our workshop in the last two or three weeks despite being regularly interrupted by the weather (one rain gauge not too far from here recorded 1m of rain over three days this week!).

starting to lime plaster

We have still not been able to find anyone else who has used lime plaster in this way – over a cavity with a flexible plaster backer – and we did have some concerns that the plaster would not even stay on the wall long enough to set. So far it does seem to work. We are using a mix that has one part cement to three parts lime putty and nine parts sand with a generous handfull of polyester fibre. We would prefer not to use cement but this was the mix specified by our designer and we want to be able to blame him if anything goes wrong .

mixing lime plaster

It’s also hard physical work. The mix starts off quite stiff and gets more elastic with mixing. Then when you put it on the wall you have to push quite hard to ensure that it goes through to the far side of the netting. This means that when it sets the netting will be in the middle of the finished plaster.

We can’t plaster in the rain because we’d get water in the plaster mix so our first piece of wall has already turned white before we’ve finished going once around the building. It’s starting to give us a good idea of what the building will look like when finished.