Plaster Repair & Restoration

Lancaster County and Chester County are full of houses older than drywall, and their walls are three coat plaster over wood lath: scratch coat, brown coat, finish coat, often with actual horsehair mixed in for strength. Plaster like that is harder, denser and quieter than any drywall, and when it is sound it deserves to be kept. When it fails, it fails in ways drywall does not, and repairing it is its own trade. We repair and restore plaster across both counties, in farmhouses, borough homes and townhouse rows. The work ranges from a single stair crack to whole room restorations, and most of it does not require losing the original walls. Many of these walls went up before 1930, and with the right repairs they are good for another century.

The failures have names. Cracks come from a house moving through seasons, and the fix is not caulk in the crack. It is bridging: the crack gets raked out, filled, and covered with fiberglass mesh and compound so the movement spreads across a wide band of wall instead of telegraphing back through a thin line. Loose plaster is a different problem. The plaster keys, the little hooks of material squeezed between the lath strips, snap with age, and whole sections start floating off the wall. You can hear it: sound plaster taps solid, loose plaster taps like a drum. Those sections get pulled back tight with plaster washers screwed into the lath, or with adhesive injected behind the plaster, before anything gets finished. Then a skim coat over the whole surface makes eighty years of patches, texture and roller stipple disappear into one flat plane. Sanding in these houses gets treated as lead work, with containment and lead safe practice, because most pre 1978 paint is exactly what you think it is.

Now the honest fork in the road. Restoration is worth it when the plaster is mostly attached and you care about keeping the original fabric, the sound, and details like curved corners and deep window reveals. When ceilings sag on broken keys across whole rooms, or walls crumble around every fastener, reattaching costs more than covering, and we say so. The overlay option, screwing 3/8 inch drywall over the plaster into the framing, is often the pragmatic winner, and we compared the approaches honestly in [drywall over plaster](/blog/drywall-over-plaster). Full demo back to the studs is the last resort, reserved for walls that are truly gone or getting new wiring and plumbing anyway. Our [Lititz plaster restoration](/projects/plaster-restoration-lititz-pa) project shows what saving the walls looks like when it goes right. Skim coated plaster also takes modern paint beautifully once it is primed with the right product. We quote whichever path each room actually calls for, and written estimates are free anywhere in Lancaster County and Chester County.