How to Fix a Plaster Wall Crack

hello friends my name is christopher today i'm going to be talking about the steps necessary for repairing small cracks like this in old plaster walls [Applause] well i just began a renovation project for our master bedroom yesterday i stripped the wallpaper from this and i discovered half a dozen pretty sizable cracks not just vertical ones at the seam but nice angled ones in the middle of the wall i've fixed several cracks in our 90 year old house throughout the years that we've owned it so these are my techniques for small cracks but if you have giant ones that are wall spanning you can modify these as necessary well as we begin let's talk about the materials we're going to need ppe for sure goggles and some sort of mask this will kick off some decent dust as we're sanding and you'd be surprised what comes out of here when you're opening that crack we're going to need crack tape plaster tape fiberglass mesh whatever you want to particularly call it this crack is small enough that tape is going to be more than enough as we sand the surface and apply it it's going to give just a little bit of structural rigidity for the walls so they're not shifting as much if you were doing a giant crack you know something big in the wall of a room you'd probably want to be drilling holes oh excuse my watch and adding adhesive for the same purpose but we don't need to do that in this small space a series of knives or spatulas depending on what part of the world you're from or what background you have i'm not going to be using the large one i'll be using these two small ones and then your joint compound this has worked just fine for me there are a lot of different options check them out for what job you have i also have a block sander we'll be sanding as this dries and a utility knife as necessary great now the first step is going to be to scrape away any excess paint and enlarge the crack which seems kind of counter-intuitive and feels gross in a way but we want to have extra space in there more surface area for the joint compound to actually attach to and seal the crack okay now that we've made our crack a little bit wider and you saw me i'm scraping off paint with the knives i'm going to take a sanding block and i'm going to rough up the surface a little bit more in preparation of the tape this tape is adhesive on one side just keep track of that as you're rolling it out i'll be taping only the part that goes down the wall from here up there's about 16 inches of crack where the two walls meet that's not a spot for taping i'm going to be filling that tightly with joint compound and then kind of running a bead like i would a caulk in a bathtub if you've done that to mimic the curvature on the inside of the wall the rest of the way down it'll make sense when you look at the finished product now we take our mud compound and we spread it on nice and thin but evenly over this be sure to push into the crack i spread mine out a bit we're going to be doing two coats of this another coat after it's done sanding where we fan this out even further depending on how big your crack is you might want to be tighter on the spread at first or wider it all depends [Music] the mesh is going to fade away as we go through after the second coat but you can keep putting this on as thick as you need you can kind of see that this wall has a sporadic texture through it so when all of this is on and the crack has been filled and this is dry and ready to go this whole wall is going to be primed with either a zinzer or kills effectively because the plaster is going to soak up a lot of paint so you definitely want to use a primer and then i'm going to be painting with a sand grit in it and so that grit will provide uniformity throughout and it'll hide you know tiny imperfections if you see anything so if that's a concern of yours right now it's fair but remember when this is all said and done it's going to blend in perfectly all right this looks very good just making sure it's nice and thin you don't want big globs of it because you're going to be sanding it when it dries every mud is going to be different whether you're doing a quick set or something that's a little bit longer for work time i'm going to let mine sit for about three hours as i'm doing the rest of the cracks in this closet and the next so i'll get to this this afternoon and by that time this dark gray will have turned to a much lighter gray almost white depending on the camera contrast and i know it'll be dry to the touch and then we'll be able to move on once this has fully dried you don't want to rush it sorry about this guys i forgot to turn my camera mic on of course for this second here's the long story short uh it dried for about four hours you can see it was a nice white i sanded it smooth and put on another very thin coat i ended up just doing two coats do three or four or as many as you need to have the tape fade away and get a nice texture all right friends another day has gone by this final coat is perfectly dry and ready to be sanded and that's pretty much the end of this video as far as technique is concerned when it comes to fixing small cracks if you still see your tape under there or it just doesn't feel right keep adding more thin layers until you're satisfied the next steps for me will be sand this and then paint it so have you had to fix big cracks like this before either in a small space or across a great big wall what similar techniques did you use what different techniques did you have to drill holes and do adhesive like i talked about in the beginning do you like my technique it works really well for me for fixing cracks and places where the corners come together i hope it'll work for you this is one video in a series of renovating my master bedroom we do wallpaper we do cracks we do paint we do trim i'm building furniture if you're interested in any of them check out the playlist links in the description below or in the card subscribe if this is good to you and good luck with your home improvement projects take care everybody bye

Channel: Kristopher Ulrich

Views: 125,335

Keywords: plaster, cracks, drywall repair, plaster repair, plaster mud, joint compound, fixing plaster, diy home improvement

Id: 8Kn6AdatYvw

Length: 7min 14sec (434 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 05 2021