Use your trowel to scrape any plaster residue from the undamaged surface of the wall and leave for about an hour to firm up. You can work this out by laying a spirit level, or straight piece of wood over the hole so that it touches the undamaged edges and checking whether your plaster is touching the straight surface. Spread more plaster into the hole until it is filled and smooth to 3mm shy of the finished surface. Scoop it out using your plastering trowel and press into the damaged area, scraping the trowel from the middle of the hole to the outside edge. This comes premixed, which is by far the cleaner option compared to knocking up plaster from dry. Paint it liberally on to the damaged area, so it soaks in, and clean your brush immediately afterwards or it will be ruined.įor damage more than 5mm deep, you will need some repair plaster. This solution will stop the dry surface of your damaged wall from sucking all the water out of your repair plaster, and allow it to dry well and stick to the wall. You can either buy this or make the primer with PVA glue in a ratio of 5:1 (water to PVA). Next, you are going to need to make up some primer. To start, you’ll need to remove all the loose plaster – use a stiff brush for this. Also, make sure you are sheeted-up well, as this can get a little messy…
PATCH PLASTER WALLS HOW TO
Using a spirit level, mark horizontal and vertical lines on your wall to make a rectangle that closely fits the shape of the damaged area. How to repair plaster walls – damaged stud wallsīefore we start filling and smoothing out our surface, we need to fix the hole.These walls are unlikely to need any framing or plasterboard fitting but will need more than one layer of plaster to repair. Solid walls are walls that are… solid! Usually, they’re made of brick or block, plastered over with a bonding plaster (or a stuck sheet of plasterboard) and topped with finishing plaster. Holes in these are usually pretty easy to fill, but you’ll need to fix some new plasterboard into the hole before you can make it good. So stud walls are the hollow kind, usually made up of a frame of wood covered in sheets of plasterboard or in plastered laths (thin strips of wood nailed to the studding). Drywalling (or plasterboard) goes onto studding. Work out which type of wall needs repairing.