Comment by arghnoname | Hacker News Reader

Comment by arghnoname | Hacker News Reader

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What's interesting is that the compromises that might come from labor issues, supplies, or shifting construction techniques get passed off to consumers as desirable and over time they seem to buy it.

With a few exceptions, plaster walls are vastly superior to drywall. USG, which makes drywall and plaster products, more or less rates lime plaster as the gold standard in a lot of ways: https://www.usg.com/content/dam/USG_Marketing_Communications...

How do they describe drywall? "Relatively smooth surface with acceptable monolithic- appearing finish under most conditions. Lowest cost."

Conventional plaster: "Best system for attaining a uniform, monolithic, blemish-free, smooth surface with excellent wear resistance."

They're understating it. Drywall is garbage. Plaster (especially if mixed in certain ways) blows it out of the water with regard to sound isolation, fire resistance, mold and water resistance (more lime than gypsum plaster), and just plain beauty and character. It even has a nice thermal mass and if you put perlite in it, some insulation properties (you'd still want real insulation of course).

And yet even very nice and expensive houses I see are drywalled. It's so ugly! People don't know what they're missing. Most have probably never seen a good plaster job that doesn't have 50 years of paint on it. I'd value good plaster work on a new house much higher than easy shit like granite countertops.

The only real pain is whenever you decide you need to cut a hole in it, the damn stuff fights back, and good luck finding people who know how to do it. I did my own plastering in a bathroom...I sucked at it, but still worth it.

There may be a parallel with software and hardware :) We need to rebrand DIY from "amateur" to "aspiring artisan", i.e. not a cheaper version of "pro", but a path to materialization of one's creative vision, including classic trade and shop techniques which are superior, but no longer widely practiced. Yes, one will inevitably fall short of a true craftsman in the lost arts, but that is often still sufficient to surpass mass-market construction.

I need to find a copy of the "Plaster and Drywall" book. It's interesting to see an organized education and lobbying association which has carried a flag for decades, is recognized by academia, industry and regulators, and encompasses both centuries-old technique and modern code compliance. It's like an "Association of Assembly Language and Rust Developers".

Hopefully the craft of plastering will continue be preserved and extended as a side effect of historic building preservation, https://www.oldhouseonline.com/repairs-and-how-to/repairing-...

> This publication has been prepared pursuant to the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, as amended, which directs the Secretary of the Interior to develop and make available information concerning historic properties. Technical Preservation Services (TPS), Heritage Preservation Services Division, National Park Service prepares standards, guidelines, and other educational materials on responsible historic preservation treatments to a broad public.

> Plaster in a historic building is like a family album. The handwriting of the artisans, the taste of the original occupants, and the evolving styles of decoration are embodied in the fabric of the building. From modest farmhouses to great buildings, regardless of the ethnic origins of the occupants, plaster has traditionally been used to finish interior walls.

Yes, it's a real challenge and compared to a "real" plasterer, I'm terrible, but the job I did was much better than drywall. My main resource was this book: https://icontractor.net/products/plastering-skills?gclid=Cjw...

I also had a book on historic preservation (Practical Building Conservation: Mortars, Renders and Plasters) and read through data sheets from places like USG.

It's hard going because so few people do this, so finding proper materials can be difficult, particularly if you're being bizarre as I was and trying to do proper three coat. Horse hair wasn't readily available, for instance, so I used some hemp fibers, etc. There is also a resurgence among people who want more 'natural' building materials.

I added some plaster arches in a part of my house to subtly demarcate the space. It totally changed the character of the house and because it was plaster, they looked original (the house was from the 30s). It wasn't my original intent to put arches there, but I wanted to hide some wiring that I couldn't easily repull.

I think it probably helped sell the house.

i live in an older apartment building that has plaster and lath walls. it definitely has better sound isolation, thermal mass, and mold resistance in my experience than drywall. what pains me is that the building manager is a moron (short-term cost minimizer) and replaces the plaster with drywall whenever a significant repair is needed. drywall sounds hollow when you tap it while plaster replies with a satisfying 'thunk'.

in fairness, it's harder to repair correctly, especially for large damage, though i have patched the wall myself with anything from patching compound to joint compound to spackle (which i understand as being similar in its constituent ingredients but not quite the same).

Plaster is on the one hand, harder to repair correctly, but on the other hand, can be repaired more seamlessly if done well.

It kills me when people replace plaster with drywall. Sometimes they'll even have it all torn out and replaced because they just need to do some repair or are doing a renovation and just want all the mess to happen up front and tacking drywall up is cheap and easy later on. So stupid.

In my last house I retiled the tub and behind the tub they had mold-resistant drywall that they used as a tile substrate (this isn't proper, but it's common enough that people think it's proper.) The drywall was nailed into plaster, which itself was covered in wallpaper. Taking all this down to fix it I found the wallpaper and drywall was moldy, but the plaster itself was not moldy. The spores just wiped right off. It's great stuff.

yah, both can be repaired to be visually seamless, but plaster can be functionally seamless too. mold seems to love drywall but can at least be scrubbed off plaster. i've done this with bleach, which apparently some mold is resistent to, and then topped it with mold-resistent paint (since it was under/behind sinks/vanities, i didn't really care if the color matching wasn't perfect).

when i was researching how to repair plaster, i learned that old-school plasterers used to make 3 passes to make it perfectly smooth on top while thick and sturdy throughout, starting with a rough "brown" layer for the bulk to a fine white layer for aesthetics and water resistance. it takes skill to do but the results are both visually pleasing and resilient (having lasted ~100 years so far in my building).

Yep, this is the traditional three-coat. What’s interesting is the framing need not be perfect. You can correct a quarter inch off true across a wall without too much trouble by varying the thickness of the brown and scratch coat. In my old house the framing way way out of wack and the drywall would have visible bends if forced to adhere to it.

Making the final wall true when dealing with imperfect framing is done with the dot and screed method. You can also add dyes into the finish coat and leave it unpainted. Shame plaster has died out for most construction.

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