Plaster Repair
Cracked, sagging, or crumbling plaster walls and ceilings, repaired the right way, without disturbing the original wall profile.
A lot of older homes around Clearwater, St. Petersburg, and the rest of Tampa Bay were built with plaster walls rather than modern drywall. Plaster is a wet material troweled on over wood or metal lath in multiple coats, which gives it a harder, denser surface than a drywall panel. That's part of why plaster has held up in these homes for decades, but it also means plaster behaves completely differently when it's damaged. It doesn't dent the way drywall does, it cracks, and it can separate from the lath behind it and start to sag or bulge.
Plaster cracking is usually caused by one or more of a few common factors:
A lot of contractors who mainly work with modern drywall will treat a plaster crack the same way they'd treat a drywall crack: tape it, mud over it, and move on. That approach usually fails on plaster within a year or two, because it doesn't address whether the plaster has separated from the lath, and it doesn't account for how much harder and more textured original plaster usually is compared to a skim coat of drywall mud. The patch ends up softer than the surrounding wall and telegraphs through paint almost immediately.
Plaster repair also has to account for the wall's original thickness and profile. Older plaster walls are often not perfectly flat, and a patch that's built up dead flat with modern joint compound can leave a visible high spot compared to the slightly wavy, hand-troweled surface around it.
We start by checking whether the plaster is just cracked at the surface or has actually separated from the lath behind it. Loose or bulging sections get properly secured or removed and rebuilt, not just skimmed over. From there we build the patch up in coats similar to how the original plaster was applied, working to match the thickness and profile of the surrounding wall rather than leaving a flat modern patch in an older, textured surface. Once the patch is solid, we match the surrounding texture and finish with primer and paint blended into the existing wall.
If you're not sure whether your wall is plaster or drywall, a quick way to check is to look at the thickness around an outlet or vent, plaster walls are usually noticeably thicker. Either way, send us a photo and we can tell you what you're working with and roughly what the repair will involve.
For homes with damage from a leak rather than age or settling, see our water damage repair page. And if the plaster's texture is the main concern once the crack itself is fixed, our texture matching page covers how we blend patches into older, more distinctive finishes. We repair plaster throughout St. Petersburg, Dunedin, and the surrounding Tampa Bay area.
