DIY Lime Plastering - Part 1: Dubbing Out, Harling & Scratch Coat

hello thanks for joining me this is march 2021 and i decided to restore a room in my property it's an old clay dabbing or cob construction with some brick walls and in this particular room the plaster become detached from the wall and it was quite damp so this is a restoration project to get the lime put back on the wall so the walls become more porous and can sort of breathe a bit more and make this little room a fit place to live in it's a bedroom is used at the moment and um it's always been damp so this is how i set about trying to sort it out anyway hope it's useful let's start doing a little frame here but what i need to do is cover this up with with some plasterboard and there's a bit of a nasty gap down at the bottom so i'll need to fix that up the other thing which is a bit of a problem is that this i've not been touching it i can promise you but this socket you can see the back box is all but uh corroded away with the damp so i'm gonna have to resize that uh electrical outlet at some point i may need to get an electrician to help me to do that side of the job but that's something that i'm going to have to sort out before i get on and do any plastering so i've chipped off the um the old lime mortar i've raked out the joints reasonably and got rid of the loose stuff i've brushed the wall off so most of the dirty jobs have been sort of finished over here that wall is completely clay and the plaster although it's crazed in places i think you can maybe see the hairline cracks in there but when you tap the plaster it's actually reasonably solid so all i've done is i've removed any areas of plaster that are a bit um loose um a bit in that corner there and there's a bit up the top there quite a big big hole going into the back of the wall there which i'll have to repair um [Music] over here likewise down into that corner and uh around there and up around that other crook rafter so there's a bit of plaster that's um still intact and largely as good as it was when the day it was put on it he's a bit rough um it was previously wallpapered so i'm glad to have got that wallpaper off and what i'll do is probably when i come to do the finishing course of the plaster i'll put a skim of finishing top coat on that and make it a little bit more presentable so that's the situation right time to make a mix um so the reason why i've put a lot of bricks in here concrete bricks um they're going straight off the foundations there so that as secure as i can get them uh and they're flush with the clay wall so the plaster will go over the top of there but there's a radiator goes on here and always we've had real problems getting the brackets to hold in this um cob wall so i've put these here so that when we come to fit the um radiator bracket again you see how the plumber has gone through a pebble there actually and that was the only thing that was really holding this um bracket on the wall put some big screws in but it literally just pulled out so anyway hopefully that will solve the problem so once you get that little hole filled in um it's just a mix of stone rubble bits of brick and that lime mix i made so i'm just in the process of dubbing out which is filling these big cavities with little bits of stone where i can fit them in so it's just a case of um getting some of this lime water and plonking it in see if we can do that don't have to be too neat so that's me finished really for today i've been doing uh a couple of big mixes um nubbing out so that's filling in various gaps um for instance down here i haven't quite got around to this but you see there's a big big gap around here so i'm going to need to somehow fill that in a little bit um so that's what i've been doing filling the gaps around the um around the wall i managed to do this this bit up here that looks okay uh just to spraying the area and then putting these cobbles in as best i can same over here where this crook rafter comes out just getting that all patched in and a little bit down there still got a little bit to finish off there you can see a couple of little pieces of stone waiting to be uh cemented in with the lime and water this bit of untidy brick work around the door i've managed to fix that up it's looking a bit more respectable now i've got it all the way up to the ceiling there intact and down that door edge as well so that's the old door there um built that little bit of wall that was uh missing a bit of a gap at the bottom but i'll think about how i'm going to do that because it's just open space anyway um all the way up that corner so i've just received this palette with the lime mortar that i'm going to be using for um plastering the walls um it's it's a hot lime from a cumbrian supplier so what i'm going to do is i'm going to make a mix in a bucket um and just put the first coat on like a hall coat so i'll get on and make that just now so this is the the harding mix i've just added some water to the to the bucket of um lime water here and i've added some hair as well so i can see the little bits of hair sticking out of the mix it's very very loose so i'm going to just give this a try it's a case of just getting a harling trowel and throwing it on the wall i've damped the wall down about half an hour ago oh [Music] so i'm not sure what i make of this it is sticking to the wall [Music] [Music] the whole [Music] i just have to improvise [Music] so yeah it goes everywhere anyway i've pretty much finished that i didn't realize i'm gonna need quite a bit more i'm gonna experiment anyway i'll persevere with it over this section here you do get uh a lot of splatter and it's important to keep this line out of your eyes [Music] well the first attempt i've kind of got the um water splattered howl onto this area of very very exposed dry well not so much dry now clay dabbing or hog i suppose that's what i wanted to achieve it's a sort of base coat and it's not a pleasant job by any means i'm covered now in sort of lime splatter i've got a bit more wall over here to do uh so i'll just get on get that finished it seems to be that you had you have to have quite a bit of water in the mix if it's too thick it tends to stay as a clump um and i didn't want that because obviously it's going to just peel off so it has to be quite a watery mix but i've added hair to it so hopefully that will um give it a bit of cohesion so we'll see how we go and hopefully the next couple of days it will dry off and form a really solid base for the for the next cause so see how it goes so it's monday morning and i did this hall court on wednesday last week and during thursday and friday i realized it wasn't really um it wasn't really drying very quickly so i've had some heat on in the room over the weekend and a dehumidifier i know you shouldn't really use a dehumidifier when you're using lime plaster because of the risk of it um shrinking but it's just a very thin coat of base coat and it's stuck quite well onto the clear background you see a little bit of a damp patch there where i've inserted some concrete bricks in that little section where i'm going to be able to now attach the radiator when i come to to that stage so the next step is to make a mix this morning and get um get a scratch coat on the sort of base coat and do that wall and this wall and the well the wall behind me which is just brick with all of the plaster removed so let's get on with that well first things first i'm going to spray the walls down and then go put a mix on just make sure the water soaks into the background a little bit seems a bit drastic having spent the last few days drying it all out but anyway it's to control suction apparently so you want to lose the water out of the mix that you put on immediately so that's what i'm doing just spray these bits down so i've got the water mixed and i've kept it as kept it as stiff as possible apparently the the less water you put in kind of the better because it's prone to shrinkage if you put too much water but you need to have it enough water in order for it to flow a bit so i've wetted it again so here we let's see go we go with this just drive it down so so what i'm doing is i'm just splatting it on basically and filling out the big hollows before trolling over at this stage i'm not over worried about the quality of the finish just filling it in [Applause] [Music] so so so this hotline most is already pre-mixed all i've got to do is add water to it [Applause] because i'm doing the scratch book i'm going to add this fiber to it to give it like a bit of strength usually it's goat hair or horse hair but this is artificial stuff it does the same job though i'm just gonna tease that into the to the dry mix before i start rolling that thing try and fluff it up [Music] so i've got my mix done and that's what it looks like when it comes out that's kind of like the consistency that i'm going with at the moment i think it's loose enough to put on the wall but not too thin there's too much moisture in it yeah so there's plenty of hair in it which is good right we'll get that on the wall so uh so having got all the mortar onto the wall and got it squared up reasonably well i then started to um scratch the wall with this uh particular particular tool and i make a diamond pattern with this um scratching tool so that it provides a better bond for the court that goes on next so that's what i'm doing here just uh making sure that uh the wall's ready then for the for the next coat to go on so while that scratch coat was uh beginning to dry out i then spent a bit of time preparing the um the reasonably good plaster that's been on the wall for maybe hundreds of years i've prepared that with this baumet primer and that will allow me then to put the final skim coat on the final um plastic coat on and give it some adhesion something to stick to so this is the baumic primer and it makes a good job of the wall so finally one of the best things for doing this is wearing some latex gloves and then sort of like um these builders gloves because the lime is really caustic on your fingers and although you think you're keeping your fingers clean with wearing gloves there's quite a lot of um line gets through the material and can cause you quite a lot of your skin quite a lot of problems so do be careful and of course uh you gotta watch it in your eyes as well so fortunately wearing glasses it's keeping the splashes out of the eyes not so bad when you're doing this sort of plastic thing but when you're doing that kind of first halloween course if you ever do that there's quite a lot of splatter about right well that's stage one completed i've got all the surfaces covered [Music] that wall was quite a challenge quite a big piece of plastering to do there's the old doorway that's a gypsum board there and i used some of that bow meat to create a primer and then put the hot lime mix on top of that and then the wall returns i got um i got that electrical wire covered with some capping just to protect it and that's the little corner where the other crook rafter comes out you'll notice it's all been scored um so that the next coat the base coat will stick to it so it's thursday now i actually finished this on tuesday and already the the top parts here are quite quite dry and reasonably hard but if you go down to the base of the wall down here it's still quite wet and i can push my finger into it quite a bit so there's a long way to go yet before this dries out i think it's because the water gradually migrates downwards from the top of the wall to the bottom and of course the base of the wall is always a bit bit damp nearest to ground level so what i've done is i've put a a little uh plug-in electric radiator in here just to um take the chill off the air got the windows open and i'm going to leave it now for a good few days probably a week at least by the looks of things as i say it's drying out at the top but probably about halfway down it starts to get really wet um so until it's dry i'm not going to be able to put the next coat on the next the the base coat so that's that's as far as it goes with this video part one the next series will be the next video will be showing how i put the base coat on and then finishing off with the finer plaster skim coat all right well thanks very much for watching part one we'll have to see whether this turns out to be a diy success or maybe a diy disaster i'm going to be a few days before this all gets dried out before i start mixing any hotline render mix again so stay tuned to see what happens in the next video please subscribe and hit the like button if you found any value in this video any comments please leave them in the space below and i'll do what i can to see if i can answer them thanks for watching see you next time

Channel: Solway17 Carlisle

Views: 4,128

Rating: 4.8873239 out of 5

Keywords: Lime Plastering, Hot Lime Render, Plastering Cobb Walls, Plastering Clay Walls, DIY Lime Plastering, Plastering with Hot Lime, Harling with Lime, Lime Plaster Scratch Coat, Baumit Primer, Hot Lime Plaster, How to Lime Plaster with Lime, Lime mortar, lime plaster

Id: DVwlCLqqPpk

Length: 25min 13sec (1513 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 12 2021