Someone on mn is a star and has done their own plastering

[Appletrees]

Is it you?

Was it plastering to ready-to-paint standard? How did you do it? was it hard? how big was the area? Even experienced diy-ers say they always get a professional to plaster. I have about five metres to do. Will I crash and burn? Thanks for your help any diy plasterers out there.

no one?

BUMP this-as we are refurbishing our first property to move into...and one large wall needs plastering...any help anyone?

Boy, I would love to be able to do my own plastering. I have tiled the splashback in the bathroom, and I am planning on tiling my kitchen. This is where my diy skills end.... sorry

i add my own question - has anyone been on a plastering course and found it useful?

I have 'plastered'.

We used tapered edge plasterboard so we only plastered up the join so quite a big cheat. It was about 5 metres in total (each side of the wall that we built). It was really easy. Built a stud wall, put up the plasterboard, used the joining tape and then plastered the join only, so only the width of the skimmer thing tool (v technical there!) was actual plastering.

I think I found it by googling american plastering techinique/ tapered plasterboard or something similar.

One side of the wall was being painted black so wasn't concerned about a perfect finish and the other had a lot of artwork on it.

Coving at the top to avoid having to have a perfect finish at the ceiling.

And it was fine to paint straight onto the plasterboard too

we tried the above technique - works well and is within the ability of a good DIY-er.

thanks buck buck i just regaled that to my husband! wonderful !

I went on a 3-day course when we were renovating our house. I managed to skim one living room wall, approximately 1.5 by 2.5m area. It actually looked fine- smooth enough that you can't really tell it wasn't done professionally. But I still got a plasterer to do the rest of the house! My reasons: the wall looked fine, but the fiddly bits round the sockets looked rubbish. Ditto the bit round the ceiling. It also took AGES to do. I got the consistency wrong(in the course they mixed it for us) so the first lot just slid off the wall. It was messy beyond belief, like a bad game show where all the contestants slither around covered head to toe in mud.

So to sum up I enjoyed the experience, and if I had a mansion to do I'd have got the hang of it eventually. But it was not a viable or cost-effective option for a small diy renovation, especially as there is a fair amount of kit needed to do the job properly.

Dh boarded, taped and filled in all our rooms upstairs and it was relatively straightforward. He has also tried skimming a wall, but it was a total nightmare. We get the professionals in to do any skimming.

today DH experimentally skimmed a plasterboarded ceiling ....may need sanding in one or two places but looks good so far.

he used joinitng compound though so it will probs shrink...

unless you get up a ladder and look at it, i think you'd never know it wasn't a professional job. (well so far so good)

We've done practically everything in our house, including the base layer of plaster, but for the proper skim layer got a professional in - not only did it look great, it took hardly any time.

If it was somewhere where the wall would be hidden behind furniture I might do it, but I've rarely been so happy to hand over £500 as to the guy who plastered our whole granny flat in 2 days.

that's not bad at all notcitrus - mum was charged that much for one ceiling few years ago!

I only need one wall doing. Now I'm starting to fret about the cost.

I paid £80 recently for a guy to skim over the grim artex to make it flat, and the same again to put up coving on another day.
Wish I could do it myself but there's such an art to getting it right, and beautifully flat.

EAPoe that was just the top layer of the walls, and it's only 2 rooms with 2 walls each, and an extra ceiling.

The Tenant From Hell then caused it all to need repainting but luckily the plaster was reasonably unscathed.