Features:

--- holiday recap

--- stories

--- plaster bonder

--- new webpage

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1. HOLIDAY DOINGS. I hope you had a relaxed (?) and blessed Christmas. My wife and I hosted most of the kids here, with wives, a fiance, and one girlfriend. Whew! Big party - and no regrets! New Year's Eve we celebrated with friends. And more family get-togethers on New Year's Day. Now I just gotta figure out how to trim my waistline!

So here we are firmly into the New Year and that for me means gettin' with the program. I want to expand the information available on the website - I'm thinking of adding more home decorating information. Got any ideas of what you would like to see along that line? And I'm toying with the idea of doing a blog. And creating more how-to products. (Never a dull moment.)

I hope this new year finds you happy and eager for your own unique adventures. I wish you the very best!

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2. STORIES. One of the things I still find amazing - although I don't know why I should - is the wide variety of jobs I encounter in the course of a year, and the people to go with them.

Every customer is unique, and the jobs themselves often have some unique circumstance or twist. I get to see just about every kind of plaster headache and have the opportunity to try them all on for size.

Some definitely are more challenging than others, and some are not much fun - just old-fashioned hard labor. You just take what comes along, though to be honest, I do turn people down sometime - I can plead advanced age or fear of heights.

Seriously, I do draw the line if the job goes up too high. I have fallen several times - no serious injuries, thank God! - but I won't go up anymore much beyond 14 feet. Let a younger man have his chance, I say.

Here's a job I'm working on now. A local business man and his wife purchased a ranch style house in a nicer part of town. It's a large house, with a full basement, built in the 50's, and badly in need of updating.

This is an ambitious couple, putting in a working day at their business, and spending late afternoons, evenings and Saturdays in the house doing the remodeling. Moving walls around, new kitchen and bathrooms, more closets, all new electrical wiring - a pretty substantial amount of change.

They have hired me to deal with the old plaster where it is still intact, and to cover the new framing. They are concerned with keeping their costs down, so they have chosen drywall for the new walls/ceilings.

The challenge here is to end up with a finished home interior that is uniform and appears to the eye to be all plaster.

Finishing new drywall so it looks like plaster is no big trick. The fun part is renovating the old plaster, which has lots of surface irregularities and defects.

The old plaster is your typical three-coat application over rock lath. The major problem it shows is all the dips. When the daylight comes in at just the right angle, you can look up at the ceilings and see waves. Not good. They want the plaster filled in and leveled.

Here's how that is done. I go along with a straightedge and lay it up on the ceiling here and there to determine the low spots (the valleys). I mark them with a pencil. Each valley gets two fill coats of hot mud. I use a 14-inch trowel, so I can pretty well span the valleys.

After that comes the first skim coat of the remaining plaster surface, always going in the same direction. With the second skim coat, I go the other way, filling in the ripples created during the first skim. A third coat may be required.

All the intact plaster ceilings are treated in this way, and the plaster walls as well. The last step is putting on the plaster-like textures that the customers have chosen. So far, I am about one half done. And I have more drywall to hang and finish as well.

There is a large market in my area for old plaster renovation, so it keeps me hopping. I enjoy the job most when I am finished, the customer is happy, and I get my check. As they say, it's a living. And a good one, too.

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3. Plaster Bonder One thing you always have to careful about is to get a tight bond between your finishing compound and the old painted plaster surface. Liquid plaster bonding agents can provide that extra insurance.

Some people like to roll the bonder on the surface like applying paint. What I usually do is stir the bonder into the water where I will mixing up my hot mud. I don't have an exact ratio. I just pour some in and say - Enough. This is just extra stick-um to supplement the glue already in the hot mud.

Before you apply the bonder, however, it is important to remove any grease, dirt or loose or scaling material, otherwise you are wasting your time and money.

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4. A New Webpage I have long been intrigued by faux painting techniques. We have some folks in my city who are really good at it, and they do some absolutely gorgeous work. For whatever reason, I have never tried my hand at it, but I decided that there is probably a lot of interest everywhere.

I recently found an article written by someone with experience in this area. Dorrie has some heads-up information for beginners that seems to me to be pretty good practical stuff, so I have built a webpage using this article.

If you are interesting in trying faux painting yourself, you can take a look at http://www.plaster-wall-ceiling-solutions.com/faux-painting-techniques.html

One of the neat things about faux painting is that there is lots of room for creativity and experimentation, like there is with wall and ceiling texturing applications. Faux painting over certain kinds of textures can yield stunning effects.

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5. Texturing DVD Many thanks to all who have been buying my texture demonstration DVD. I hope it sparks your excitement and creativity as you beautify those repaired plaster surfaces. I am looking forward to getting some feedback on how you are doing with it, and any suggestions you may have for additional information.

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My wish for you this new year is for the BEST in everything. May all your projects succeed and give you pleasure for many years to come!

Edwin Brown aka Plasterguy