We specialise in professional plastering of walls and ceilings works.

About Plastering

Most Singapore homeowners will consider re-plastering the current wall or roof to be smooth and even buying a flat and house resale. Some current wall plaster can be harmed by scratches, irregular wall plaster (particularly older HDB flats), current wall sprayed with rock-stone texture, spray texture, etc. due to ageing of the house. In some cases, the wall plaster or paint may be debonded or peeling off if the wall is damaged due to humidity or water intake. When the concrete slab is in contact with water and the current strengthened bars are corroded and expanded, the severe condition will be spreading concrete and causing the concrete spill and fall off if severe.

What is Plaster?

Plaster is a type of dry powder made of cement and sand to be blended with water to form a paste for skim-coating wall surfaces like brick walls and other masonry substrates for smoother finishing. Unlike stiff-drying mortar, plaster dries fairly soft and it is this pliability that makes it perfect for a soft, smooth finish for a substratum foundation for priming or paint coat application.

Plastering Walls and Ceilings

The basic purpose of plastering walls and ceilings is to repair the cracks or peeling of a prior surface paint layer. In more serious instances, in older houses or structures, plastering is also chosen to solve spalling concrete substrates.

Plastering works are generally required for fields subject to moisture or grease such as toilets and kitchens, as these places are generally prone to painting, blistering or cracking owing to the elevated tendency to be exposed to oil and water vapour that degenerates paint adhesion over time.

When a portion of the structural layer starts to peel, or becomes flaky or roughened on the surface, you see indications of spilling concrete. In some instances, you may even witness pits, and you may see tiny bits of concrete substrate breaking loose from the primary structure itself.

Plastering companies will involve hand tools such as trowels to make the plaster paste on the substratum even out and smooth. At this stage, the plaster should not be too moist because it requires a slight degree of firmness to fill holes and fill cracks and crevices. When too much moisture is present, the plaster might sink into the shapes of the hollows, resulting in an uneven surface.

The painters will need abilities to apply pressure while working flat along with their trowels while pressing the plaster on the surfaces of the wall. It’s normal for ridges and trowel marks to form on the layer of plaster as the trowel’s shape collects plaster along its bottom as you push it against the ground. However, as the plaster becomes harder and firmer as you work on it, these plaster ridges can be readily smoothed.

The trowel is a versatile plastering instrument; it can be used to scrape off any thickened or excess plaster created at the corners of the wall. You will have to run them along with a wet paintbrush (flick off surplus water) with large strokes to smooth the plastered corner edges. Be sure to use a brush with good bristles, as if the bristles are too coarse they can cause the edges to form lines and streaks.

Plastering work can be labour intensive, requires techniques & expertise as well as time-consuming and since plastering includes doing the job before cement mortar dries, many will not want to take the risk of a badly done plastering job on their own, but it takes time and effort to scrape off the hardened plaster surface.

Plastering Tools

Various kinds of troweling instruments are available for various methods and purposes. The rectangular and marginal trowels are used to smear and manipulate plastered surfaces while pointing trowels are used in corner regions where rectangular trowels are unable to reach. There is also the angle trowel that is helpful when perpendicular right-angled surfaces are concerned with angled edges.

Plastering trowels with the plastering hawk are usually used hand in hand. A plastering hawk is a sheet of flat square metal connected with a vertical central handle below. The hawk is for the painter to put the mortar on top of the metal platform while the handle is for keeping the device while picking up the mortar with the trowel to apply it to the wall and ceiling regions.

Plastering New Walls

Plaster can be applied straight to plasterboards in the event of fresh builds. Plasterboard screw heads should be counter-sunk in preparing and the joint between boards should be taped. Metal angle beads are used around internal angles to guarantee a crisp finish.

Then it’s just a case of applying a plaster layer. Before work starts on the walls, it is normal to set ceilings with plaster. All plastering blockwork walls should receive one sand and cement rendering coat, known as a scratch coat.

Using a float with nails in it, this is left to set and then scratched in a swirling fashion to provide a stable key for the next coat that is applied when the first scratch coat is still green but before it has completely dried out.

You can use these two coats to’ dub’ and fill in any indentations or undulations in the wall.

The topcoat plaster skim finish is applied at a stage where the plasterer judges that the render has set enough. This should be smooth and not show any trowel marks or undulations as it is, essentially, the finished surface of the walls and ceilings in your new home.

Replastering of Existing Walls

It can replaster the current irregular or textured wall and make it smooth, even before painting. However, the home proprietor must be conscious that re-plastering with putty may not be a useful task if the current block wall or concrete wall is not straight and lean. Smoothing the wall with putty cement can only apply no more than 5 mm thick, no curve, bend, wave or curved wall that exceeds 5 mm may provide you with a straight wall or roof. The putty application can only assist not align the wall or roof to smooth the wall.

Alternatively, you can choose to:

• Remove the current plastering and re-plaster the cement plaster wall with level pack directly to the wall and ceiling.
• Enlarge the wall with a fresh block wall and a fresh cement plaster re-straight line.
• Gypsum boards are popularly used in ceilings to align and make the smoothen the surface.

Re-plastering to smoothen existing textured surfaces

The ancient and damaged (peeling off) paint must be removed and cleaned before painting to replaster the current spray texture wall and ceiling like rock stone finish. Is all the current paint going to be removed? Not necessary, as the well-based texture paint can do the job to cover some existing uneven wall and the new wall putty or stopping compound can be overcoat.

The current wall paint is recommended to remove and re-plaster with cement base simple plaster for the internal wall as opposed to weathering particularly with fair-faced brick externally, if the wall was badly humid, to replaster.