Cracked Plaster Walls: To Repair or to Replace
In all of our years of home renovation we have discovered that some plaster walls with cracks can be easily repaired. Some require a great deal of skill and finesse to bring them back. Some are just lost causes.
If you can repair and patch the plaster, this is the easiest thing to do in the long run. Knocking down plaster and removing the lathe behind it is a messy, time consuming job. Not to mention that hauling all the heavy plaster out of the house and into the dumpster is back breaking work.
Many people advocate just hanging sheetrock over the damaged plaster. We have done this. There are benefits, especially in a house like ours where the insulation has been blown in. Removing the plaster and lathe (the wood or metal mesh behind the plaster) causes the insulation to come out of the walls. Then new insulation will also have to be installed.
If your home is not insulated I would hands down take the extra time and effort to removed the plaster and insulate. The added benefit is that once the walls are open you can easily redo the electrical wiring and plumbing inside the walls. This is what we have chosen to do in most rooms where the plaster was not able to be salvaged.
The major problem with sheetrocking over plaster is what will you do with all of the trim work in your home? If your home has beautiful wood trim you will want to think about how you are going to remove it and replace it on top of the sheetrock without damaging it. This will require a level of carpentry skill that is above most novice DIYers. Even if you do not care about the trim from a preservationist point of view, replacing all of the wood will be quite costly.
If you have windows and doors on the walls you are going to run into additional issues. You will need to increase the depth of door jambs and rehang any doors that have been displaced. This is not an easy task. The doors never seem to fit back in exactly right. You will also need to find a creative way to address the increased depth in the window casing.
This wall has just been replastered. There had been numerous cracks in the wall, a couple of them deep, most on the surface. All of the plaster was still firmly attached to the lathing behind it, another important factor to consider before you attempt to salvage the plaster on your walls. Will you need to use some large screws to secure it into place? or will you need to chip away some areas and patch.
Up next for my wall, primer. I can hardly wait.
