To achieve good quality in plastering work and avoid consequential defects and necessary repairs, you will need high-quality material for sure, but experience, skills of a plasterer and applying of a couple of tricks are essential. If you are the first timer or simply were dissatisfied with the quality you’ve been achieving so far, here are some tips and tricks you might find useful.
The most important skill is the skill of troweling. The trowel is the dominant tool you will use to apply the plaster onto the surface, smooth it and flatten it, repair flaws and efflorescence and finally polish the plaster. Trowels, even those of high-quality production, are not expensive, thus invest into a proper trowel and keep it in good condition. This means to keep it clean and polished and to practice wearing it in properly. Depending on the skills you possess and how good you are at maneuvering trowel, pick the adequate size of it. The bigger ones are harder to control.
Use water spray gun
Since plastering requires watering of a surface prior applying plaster on it, another useful trick is to use water spray gun instead of splash brush to apply water. Wide splashing brush will do just fine work, but the whole procedure is more complicated and less convenient due to frequent bending down and having both hands occupied. Water spray with wide misty spraying is a lot better option, and the results are equal or even better.
If you conduct properly all phases of wet and dry troweling with the final dry trowel polishing phase, you should achieve a perfectly smooth finish on your walls. This only should be enough to prevent rather troubling and unnecessary sanding down the plaster. The plaster is rather rough to sandpaper making it smooth too easily before it has achieved any visible correction of the mere plaster. If you try to sand it down, you’ll spend tons of sandpaper and equally huge amount of time, and the definite results still might not suffice the desired quality. So, it far better to go back and do some of the major steps and phases again, if you have happened to do it poorly, then to do it all poorly in a rush and rely on sanding it down at the very ending phase.