Plaster Fireplace Converted from brick Masony

Hello everyone, this video series is in response to Ron from Honolulu Hawaii that requested some instruction on converting a brick fireplace to a colored plaster fireplace. So we took a brick fireplace, attached some metal lath using powder actuated fasteners and tie wire and applied a combination of material to achieve the best, strongest cementitious plaster coating, preparing it for the final finish plaster which I will show you in the next upcoming video.
Music provided by Mini Vandals/Out on my Skateboard , and Neffex/ Enough

[@mrgaddafi6291]

Good job 👍

[@ernieforrest7218]

In answer to your reply to my recent comment on adding portland cement to Structo lite or Gypso lite as an
excellerator. Actually every house built up to the early to mid 50s was plastered on the interior.
That was the case where i lived in SE Pa. not far from Philly. Here in Florida where i now live most houses were plastered into the 60s.
Rocklath was installed on the wood framing. Rocklath is a gypsum product much the same as drywall, but is in 16”x 48” pcs 3/8” thick.
Wire lath pre made pcs were installed on the lath in all the angles. And galvanized metal corner beads on all outside corners, same as they do on drywall. The base or brown coat plaster was also a gypsum product and came in 100# bags. We used large mortar boxes for mixing using long handled mortar hoes. The boxes were large enough to hold a 3 to 5 bag mix, with about 13 square shovels of sand for each bag.
A good days work for 2 plasterers and a good laboror was considered to be 20 bags. In around the mid 50s a couple of products came out which replaces the sand. One was called ( perolite ) and the other was called ( vermiculite ). They were both sold in bags to be added to the Gypsum in place of the sand. Both were very light in weight, and were much easier on the plasterers due to that. Mixing by hand with a hoe however was difficult at best and made mortar mixers pretty much a necessity. Within a short period the gypsum companies were selling the
brown coat premixed in the bag with the perolite. Hence the names Structolite, and Gypsolite came to be. A good days work then became 30 to 35 bags for the same crew. The brown coat would begin to harden within about 3 hours after it was applied onto the wall. And there was no way to prevent that unless a retarder was added. The gypsum companies provided retarders in small bags for free as a service.
But by and large retarders werent used in the brown coat. So by late morning one of the plasterers would drop back and run a cork float over the work just to knock down the welts and fill in as required. Also cut all the angles with a trowle and cut back the corner beads a bit.
Also make sure all the electric boxes were cleaned out. We always carried a pointing or margin trowel in a back pocket for that type use as well as for cleaning off the plastering trowles.
The finish or white coat as it was known as was a high grade of lime called finish lime. The same mortar box would be cleaned out well or a box only used for that purpose, which was to add alot of water into the box than just open the lime bags and pour it into the water. You got to know how much water was needed per bag, and we would fill the box pretty much right to the top and just let the whole thing sit over night. By the next morning it would be sorta like looking at an open container of cottage cheese.
We would push the lime mix thru a screen made with a wood frame and a pc of diamond mesh wire lath in order to break up any lumps and make it more uniform. From there it was placed on a large mortar board used only for the white coat. Of coarse the mortar board was placed on a wooden cricket which placed the board at about 36” from the floor.
There the lime mix would be made to look like a large donut with a large hole in the middle with our trowles.
Then a small amount of water added into the ring or hole, and a retarder added to that small amount of water and mixed in well.
In case you dont know, regular kitchen type cream of tarter could be used as retarder and quite a few guys preferred using that.
But back to the mix, after the retarder was added, more water was poured into the donut hole.
Then came the gauging plaster added to the water with a scoop.
Then the 2 plasterers would use their hawks and trowles to mix the whole thing together on the mortar board.
Most plasterers used scaffolding, but never stilts. The horses were usually 8’ or more long and depending on room size as to how many.
For the brown coat we would place the with some space between the planks. But for the white coat most guys preferred the plank be solid with no space. And for the white coat we never placed the mortar board on the scaffold, always in another room nearby.
The white coat was applied in 2 thin coats, we would first trowel a coat onto the ceiling, then on the wall from the ceiling down about half way to the floor assuming an 8’ high ceiling as most were back then.
Then we would double right back over it with what was called the scim coat.
We then filled the angles with either an aluminum angle float, or a hard rubber device called an angle paddle.
When a set of the mortar took place which if mixed correctly coincided with the use of all the mortar on the board we would start trowling it.
We would go from one end of the scaffold to the opposite end while holding the trowle at the proper angle with a wide good bristle brush holding the water in front of the trowel. Just walk from one end to the other end without stopping. Some guys preferred trowling 2 times in opposite directions. We preferred 2 times in the same direction, and then we used just the wet brush to go over just the ceiling. The felt brushes were a bit better for the brushing part than the bristle ones were, but not for the trowling.
As for pricing back in those days. Some would use a yardage cost pricing method.
But we would rather look at the type of job as for time. Some jobs would allow for using less time than others due to the room layout and room sizes. We could also determine almost to the bag how much material was involved. So time plus material cost was what we preferred plus what ever we thought we could get by with charging over that for overhead and profit. And then hope we could collect our money, especially from some of the builders. Actually, drywall was a blessing in disguise for us, meaning my family business.
My father was actually a bricklayer, not a plasterer, and thats what he preferred doing. He learned plastering during the depression years due to being hired on by a large insurance company that had forclosed on large apartment buildings in Philly.
They gutted the things and totally redid the interiors. And he made friends with a plastering crew, which led to several years work plastering.
So we were forced into making a decision as to what our future was going to be since the plastering had dried up due to drywall.
So we decided that we would become home builders, and compete with those who in a way had chosen to put us out of business.
And guess what, the last 4 homes that i have built for myself have been drywalled. lol
Im now 87 years old, my son is still in the building business here in Florida, and his son who has one year left in college has decided that he will be joining him when he graduates.
But i still enjoy watching guys like you who know how to take mortar from a hawk while using a proper type of trowel.
As you well know not everybody on youtube does that. lol
Most of these wet backs down here dont even use a hawk and trowel, they use a thing i would call a slicker, which could also be used in lieu of a darby. They just load the thing with mud from the mortar board then apply it onto the wall. They can actually go pretty quick with them, but they cant finish a whole wall with them. So somebody who can use a hawk and trowel needs to be working along with them as well.
And they really seem to waste alot of mud by it dropping on the ground as they are applying it.
Big crews of them on the job also, and at the end of the day they dont seem to have accomplished much more than we did with a 3 man crew. But i will say what they do looks very nice when its finished.
But hey, we dont need no steenkin trowel. lol.