Old English Plaster

For today's first trick, we learnt how to plaster, in Old English finish. In a way, we're lucky, because the rest of the house is plastered in this style, so we're justified in plastering the garage and the rest of the house, in the same way, without it seeming odd. Lucky because neither of us has plastered before, and flat, smooth plastering was likely to take a while to master, even if I have practised on the odd Christmas cake before. I have to admit that it's not a perfectly flat, smooth surface.

Old English finish, however, is not meant to be. Instead, the surface is uneven, with prominent trowel marks. If it weren't deliberate, you'd think it was incompetent. To its credit, it covers uneven walls very well: if the plaster surface was perfect, the underlying lack of right angles, plumb verticals, and parallel  walls would shout at you.

The experiment appears to have been a success: we'll be sure when its dry and painted, of course. For now, we've plastered only the one board that covers the stud wall: in time, I'll dry line the entire room, but that's not urgent. It was more economic than I thought, too: a quarter bag of plaster (6.5kg, plus 3l water) was enough to cover the board, and do the joints over about half the ceiling, having fortunately taped them before mixing the plaster.

That finished, we then put down the last section of floor that can be done before the doors are replaced with walls and windows. The builder should be starting that work in the next week, so we also needed to clear access to everything he needed, which entailed moving everything previously standing in the front third of the room onto the new floor, leaving the front area (almost exactly three sheets worth of flooring: two deep on the door side, one deep on the far side) bare for him to work in.

We then worked through a stack of almost a hundred pots, planting up small plants that have grown on from seedlings over the past few months, and which are mostly now out on the weed membrane. We also potted up a dozen big pots of tomatoes, and a number of chillies and sweet peppers, which are on the benches in the greenhouse now.

It got rather late, so the cats had to come and shout for us to come in.