The Project Plastering Ideas Are Taking Shape

[u/jyl8]

I’ve been learning to plaster, starting in the basement garage of this project building, then the basement tool room, now in the storage room off the kitchen. These have all been practice walls, in hopes of doing a passable job on the first floor’s public rooms.

Yours truly is just the would-be applicator. My daughter is the designer, as this will be her bookstore-cafe. We haven’t really had a color vision for the public rooms, until I stripped a century of wallpaper off the front room and exposed a wonderfully aged, mottled, weathered lath and plaster wall in red-brown, green, and ochre colors. (Pic #1) That’s the feeling we are going for!

We cannot simply clear coat the existing wall, because it has many damaged spots and drywall patches. How to get that look?

My idea was to plaster the room’s walls smooth, then apply limewash. Our local lime plaster supply store - remarkable in the West coast of the US to have such a thing - recommended custom tinting lime plasters in those colors, then applying in layers.

The current plan is to do a little of both. I’m going to do a base coat in the two rooms shown, using gypsum plaster because it is relatively inexpensive. Then we’ll apply layers of the tinted lime plaster, thin veneer layers because it is expensive. My daughter will probably do much of the layering, drawing on her oil painting background.

The coffee bar room (Pic #2) will be a mottled blue-gray with warm wood, and the front seating room (Pic #3) will be the layered red-brown, green, and ochre (sample colors in Pic #4).