![]() The plaster crumbles straight down to the ground – creating a heap and a fog.Īs your pile of crumbled plaster starts to grow, and when it reaches about shin height, you pull out a snow or other shovel. In most cases, it doesn’t matter if you just scrape off the plaster and/or yank the lath right off while you’re at it. Of course, that’s not to mention the paint that has been chosen to cover it through the years.įeeling a little sly, you might grab a shingle remover and pry. Things get extremely dusty in this process.īeyond that, maybe you’ve considered questions about the lead content in the plaster itself (and its dangers, especially when released in airborne form). At minimum, you could sit a box fan in a window and point it outward. Plaster Removal Creates a Lot of Dustīest practices – you’d set up dust containment and perhaps a means of negative pressure ventilation. It’s a great way to take out some frustration and with it, removal seems to go twice as fast. Feeling tough, some might grab a sledge hammer. The most common and flat-out brutish way to go about removing plaster: Whack the wall with the claw of a hammer, work in a long pry bar and have at it. But from experience, I find instead that most plaster and wood lath surfaces are often easily twice as thick – around 3/4″. In terms of demolition, the best case scenario – your plaster is only ⅜” thick. The amount of debris and waste it produces is simply shocking. ~jb Removing Plaster in Old HousesĪny old house owner that has removed plaster knows just how, well, miserable it can be. And as always, I welcome constructive feedback on this technique in the Comments section at the bottom. It featured a procedure I used with a friend to neatly remove a section of plaster from a ceiling. Even the scrap bits that were too short to do anything useful with were good- as kindling.This post is a rework from an essay originally published with the title Ten Hammers. I left a bulk of it in the Outtake below (jump to it clicking that link). We have used them to build garden trellises and other crafty stuff. The plaster has to go to the dump, unfortunately, but the lath strips, if you save them into long enough pieces, can be useful. Even my professional nail gun wouldn't touch them. If the studs are hardwood like ours are, you'll be predrilling and screwing to get those 2x4's sistered on. That's too far for drywall for it to be stable and solid-feeling. A lot of the older homes were built 24" on center. if your existing studs are further apart than 16" on center, then add in some studs between them. Sister some 2x4's onto the existing studs, and attach the drywall to those. It is an exercise in futility putting drywall on studs where plaster had been. Many nails would break off when I tried to extract them. I nicknamed it "The Big Ole Bust-It-Up Bar". Did I mention some of the boards have branches still sticking out of them? It really is like they chopped down whatever trees were there and made boards whatever size the trees were. Most of the studs are hardwood and not any particular size. We bought a 150 year old pile of a house, which is partially drywall over log cabin, and partially plaster. "Also learned that the framing under plaster walls is not suitable for drywall."
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