Gallery 7
Shower Ceiling
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1
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2
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3
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4
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Photo #1 - #4: Here's an example of a plaster repair over a shower area, where there is a tremendous amount of moisture. It's very obvious that this ceiling often gets wet while the water is on, either from splashing or being formed by the steam.
This ceiling also illustrates how ugly things can get, and yet how quickly they can be put back in order. Notice in photo #1 & #2 the inital scene. Often when water damages a surface, there are some things that become rather clear to me. First, I realize that this ceiling appears worse than it seems. It's just been let go for a while. The 'bubbling' area turned out to be mostly latex paint that had gotten very rubbery and it had 'bagged', which I describe as paint that has sagged down from the surface and captured water behind it. The water runs out, or is trapped behind it, and the sag remains, looking very bad. The moisture on this ceiling also reacted with the lime based finish that caused the minerals in the lime to bubble up as well, which makes it look extra bad. In addition, the homeowners smoked in this bathroom quite heavily, and the evidence of this is the 'brown' film that is on the surface. This helps add another layer of ugly to this area! But we don't have to worry about that. What shows on the surface is not always go very deep.
In photo #3 you'll see that I removed all of the plaster that was loose. You'll notice that the ceiling is rather sound, with the gray areas showing the areas where solid base coat was in good shape. The area deeper into the shower area and down the wall, I had to scrape down to the actual paper of the 5/8" thick plasterboard that was the foundation of this ceiling. Fortunately the plaster had taken the brunt of the damage, so the board was not affected and was sound. I first sprayed a bleach based cleaner over the surface and around the area I was going to repair, just to make sure I got rid of any mold that might be present, and also to deal with that nasty smoke residue, which includes tar and other things that make it clear that smoking is not a good thing to be doing in a bathroom - or anywhere else! The next step was to let this dry thoroughly and then apply a latex bonder. This sealed the paper and surface well, so the plaster could be applied over it. I mixed up some base coat and applied this first, embedding fiberglass mesh into the angles. The base coat replaced what was removed, and this was allowed to set up hard. The final photo shows I finished the area out with a thin layer of lime based smooth coat. I troweled this down to a nice hard and smooth finish, and now it just has to dry for about five days and it can be primed and painted. I suggested they avoid using during this time, to give it time to cure out and thoroughly dry out. In fact, I had the homeowner put a fan on low that night that would blow right on the area for about a day to help it dry out.
This example just shows how dramatic a change plaster can make in a very short amount of time. This project took about five hours total, with the help of a fan which helped speed up the drying time of the bonder.