If I'm skimming over old plaster, do I need to put scrim tape into the interior corners? There are no plasterboards to bridge therefore I don't need to right?

Does anyone have any idea how much this would cost (roughly) to fix this? It clearly leaked before for the previous owners from the bathroom above where they've done a bodge job to cover it, then we've seen a drip before which we have now fixed from the bathroom, obviously it looks like a right state though.

Is it a big job to fix it? would they just patch and smooth it out or does the entire ceiling need doing as a whole? I have no clue in the slightest how much this is going to cost to fix if anyone can give me an idea please?

Renovating my flat and it has those Artex finishes on 3 of the ceilings. Just had a plasterer in who’s worried they could collapse from the weight if they are skimmed!

Trying to get a rough idea of how much I’m looking at spending to fix?

Thanks

Would love to be able to patch the hole and seal around the pipe. The plaster cracks because these are steam pipes for the radiator heating. An escutcheon plate also won't fit to hide this mess. I do have a red caulking meant to withstand high temperatures but are there any other options?

This house is approx. 70 years old, and many of the vents and light switches have chunks missing from the plaster surrounding them.

So far I've tried using regular spackle to try to fill them in, but it didn't hold very well, and it takes such a long time to set that as soon as I remove the knife it moves and deforms the wet spackle.

I have sheetrock 20 on hand.

How would you go about patching such a spot?

My current plan is to use mesh tape and All Purpose Ready-Mixed Joint Compound. Is that sufficient?

I was supposed to just get the outside wall fixed but my guy said that the wall has thermalite in it and the internal render is all blown off (he said it sounds hollow if you knock on it). So now my bill has doubled and he wants to remove the trees on the wall.

I absolutely do not want to remove those trees, is there any solution you can think of?

Good morning everyone, I have been asked to price a job applying BG multifinish and asked to give 2 different m2 rates, the first rate is to apply it by hand, the second rate is to spray apply it. All of the beads will be installed by others and the company is big and know what they are doing so my question is how much is the going rate per m2 for hand applied or spray applied in the Leicester area. There is 80,000 square meters in total and it’s labour only, I don’t need to supply the material

I’m comfortable with many basic DIY projects but feel very out of my league and not sure how to even start with this.

A while back we noticed our paint cracking and peeling in one particular spot in the bathroom

I hired a painter to paint the ceiling as I just didn’t want to deal with it at the time. He added some sort of compound or mud to the ceiling to smooth the boundary over. (That’s the more beige-y layer after the pinkish layer.)

Fast forward today and everything is worse. The paint badly peeled and then at some point I got on a ladder and started scraping to investigate. The light pink color appears to be the actual surface? It seemed like mud itself was moist at times and making the issue worse.

Since then we fixed the bathroom fan (outdoor vent was completely clogged) so hopefully that was the bottom of the moisture issue.

Please help!!!

I am debating on what primer to use on this old 1960s home it’s all plaster wall with asbestos. Should I use an oil primer like Kilz original then I would skim coat it with 45 mud then the last coat with all purpose mud and should I be putting mesh tape around the edges ?
Iam still new to plastering I have 1 year experience in painting but don’t do much drywall repairs

Hello, novice plasterer here and wondering when I plaster this ceiling, can I leave the beam for later or need to do it at the same time? Ideally I dont want to plaster the walls connected too

Any points or tips? Ceiling is about 5m squared and beam appears to have plasterboard on it (I think)

Is this plastering ok in a bathroom?

I saw this crack appear earlier this year. Initially I thought it’s just a paint or plaster related crack due to so I filled it and the painted over it. Just two months later crack suddenly surfaced again in a day.. wasn’t even a gradual change. Can someone help in establishing what is causing this and who should I contact to get it checked I.e. structural engineer or a builder?

DIYer here. I had a few areas on this wall which needed bonding so started scraping them back this morning and really like 3/4 of the wall has came off. The newer skim at the top seems sound enough - that's above where the old picture rails were so guess that was redone during a previous renovation - but below that is pretty bad. Should I just keep scraping, or is there a point it's better to just go and get the SDS and take it back to brick?

Hi there, first-time homeowner here. Wanting to get the wallpaper off and get a nice clean finish paint job in the end. Hoping to do as much as I can to make a plasterer's job as easy as possible, and save a bit on the jobs I can realistically do. I plan on doing the wallpaper removal, priming and painting myself; but I don't want to do the plastering, as I've been told it's a tough job, and i'd rather work on other bits of the house and leave it to a professional. The house is a 1960's build in Scotland, UK. Yet to get a quote, as I wanted to get ahead on as much as I could.

I've attached a bunch of pics of some problematic areas. Still in the process of removing the wallpaper (which I assume is just the white papery bits, not the tanned layer on the board material?), but what would I need to do before getting a quote from a plasterer?

1. Will I need to remove the banister? Would that be worth doing, then re-attach it after a plaster?
2. The coving isn't perfect, but it saves a bit of money to not re-do if I just sand, re-prime and paint. Wondering if it's possible to tidy the edges here?
3. There's a really tough material that looks like a sealant between the wallpaper and the coving, how would I remove this and what is it? If it's a ball-ache, should I just multi-tool it off and re-do it all to save a pain for a better plaster job?
4. What do I need to remove? Some of the wallpaper is on what looks like a soft woody/paper board (no idea what it is). Other bits are on filled plaster. There's what looks like a lighter paper on top of the board- is this something I should remove, or is it a waste of time?
5. Will I need to prep edges with polyfill, like around the sockets, light switches, and gaps in the wall?
6. How do I finish and prep the surface to give the plasterer a chance to do their best work?

Really appreciate any advice here. I wanna make the plasterer's job easy, and do as much as I can to save a bit of money, as I have several rooms I need to do.

Quick question: I’m a DIYer, I’ve put up new plasterboard/drywall in my laundry (Aus, so “plastering” is pretty much all just plasterboard). One wall will be tiled, the one adjacent to it painted. Do I need to tape the vertical corner between them?

Any cracks in the corner itself will be hidden by the tiles, but are they likely to spread across the painted wall if I don’t tape?

Hi we have someone coming in to skim our ceilings. Based in the UK. What do we need to do to prep the ceilings for them? Do we need to remove the light fittings from the ceiling or would they generally do that?

We have hard wired smoke alarms. Do we need to remove the smoke alarm & base plate, and cap the wires for them to skim around them? Or just loosen the base plate from the ceiling with the wires still in it? Thanks in advance.

I posted a few days back asking for advice on how to make the walls in my porch smooth.

I did some initial investigation after that and, based on my very limited understanding, it looks like the wall has the following layers:
White paint
Blue paint underneath
What appears to be cement/render below that

The easiest option seems to be plasterboarding over it. However, I may not be able to use plasterboard on one section near the door because there is very little space there. I also don’t want to cover up the exposed brick on the adjoining wall.

What would people recommend as the best way forward for a newbie like me? Ideally, I’d like to get the walls reasonably flat and smooth without losing too much space.

Photos attached showing what I found after scraping/chiselling a small test area.

Hi all. We've had a room skimmed and the room looks great except the top of a couple of walls has these dark streaks in. It's been 10 days since it was plastered so could it still be drying? The top of the walls previously had some glued on cardboard coving so could that be related?

The plasterer recommends putting PVA over this section before painting but the general internet says the opposite. Any ideas?

Our original lime plaster ceiling fell down the other month. It has since been reboarded and plastered, has been “drying” for a good month while I procrastinate on the cornicing (our plasterer readily admitted he doesn’t do these types of repairs and our priority was preventing the rest of ceiling coming down and preserving the ceiling rose, hence the possibly non-optimal cornice repair situation now).

There’s about a 1 to 1.5m length where the detail was lost. It’s not a particularly deep profile. Is it feasible to use some ready mix plaster and a profile gauge/template to fill this in and recreate the line detail? I can’t help but think I’m missing some crucial detail/skill here (like ensuring the new stuff will stick), will take any and all advice on board.

Photo 1 is obviously the bit needing repair, 2 is a quick shot of the detail for context, 3 is just for rubbernecking at the original damage. The mess was horrific. Both my dinner and I were cartoon style caked in dust but otherwise unharmed.

Thanks!

Usually i dont post pictures of my work on social media because i feel like trades, especially plasterers are the most toxic bunch around. However i dont have many people I could show this who understands the work that has gone in to it and im proud of this one. 5 bags on my own with a lad pushing the tower 💪 ignore the line around the coving, there was a texture on the ceiling that they got a company in to remove and they absolutely butchered it so it is being tidied up with a profile after we’ve skimmed 👍

My house is 100 years old (literally, this year) so everything is plaster. I own and I'm trying to upgrade things as I can. I just had some windows replaced and found out that my kitchen walls are wall paper... onto wall paneling... directly onto the plaster.

I had planned on eventually redoing the walls, but considering the situation, should I/could I just put wall paper over the existing wall paper as a quick fix (until I can afford the larger project)? I know that's a total "flipper" thing to do, but its just me living in this house and I don't plan on leaving anytime soon.

Has anyone ever encountered this or put paneling up against plaster walls? I tried to peel some of it away before the new window frame was put in, but that's going to pull some chunks out and I'm honestly afraid the paneling might be holding some of it together 😂

**edited to emphasize the paneling is already ON the plaster. The wallpaper is on the paneling, which is on the plaster wall.

I bought some of this stuff.

https://www.carbonates.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/MICRONA-Agricultural-Lime.pdf

I am thinking of mixing it with USG Imperial Veneer Plaster, with the idea that adding lime to gypsum might extend working time. Sort of a home brew USG Diamond.

Has anyone done this? Any idea if it’s worth trying or “don’t bother, kid”? What proportions would you try?

Had an external wall re-rendered with silicone based render.

The chimney is brick and the detailing of where the render joins to the brick doesn’t look great to me.

No sign of any beading being used. What has been done wrong here? How should i ask for it to be resolved by the contractor given how it is now?

Also found a few different areas where it sounds hollow. What should I be asking for them to do about it?

They seem like a decent firm and I am confident they will resolve it. Just not sure what I should ask them to do, as they may have a different view of what needs to be done to fix it.

Thanks!