Hunters Hill
Plastering in Hunters Hill, where plenty of the walls are not plasterboard
The smallest council on this side of the harbour and one of the oldest residential districts in Sydney. A lot of what looks like a plasterboard wall here turns out to be something much older behind the paint.
Sandstone was quarried and built with on this peninsula before most of Sydney existed, and a good deal of that early housing is still standing and still lived in. Behind the paint you find solid plaster run onto masonry, lath and plaster ceilings, and fibrous plaster ornament that predates every material a modern plasterer carries on the truck.
Alongside it sits the rest of the council area. Gladesville carries a broad mix of brick houses and post-war blocks, Henley and Huntleys Cove sit on the river edge, and Woolwich holds some of the oldest fabric of the lot. One quote here can involve three different plastering systems in the same house.
- Photo quote to begin
- Older systems identified first
- Original fabric left alone until agreed
We work out what it is first
Solid plaster, lath or board. The repair method follows from that, not from what the damage looks like.
Nothing original is removed on a guess
If a surface might be worth keeping, it gets discussed before a tool goes near it.
Straight about limits
Where a job needs a specialist or a consent you do not have yet, you hear that at the quote.
Licence number 244708C
Our NSW contractor licence, quoted in full so you can check it.
Hunters Hill coverage
- Council area
- Municipality of Hunters Hill
- Postcodes covered
- 2110 and 2111
- Typical work
- Solid plaster repair, lath and plaster ceilings, ornate matching, wall repairs, re-lining
- Nearest covered areas
- Canada Bay, Lane Cove, Ryde
Across the municipality
Six areas, and the housing each one is made of
For a council this small, the building stock varies a lot from street to street. What is under the paint depends heavily on which part of the peninsula you are standing on.
| Area | What the housing is mostly | What that housing usually needs |
|---|---|---|
| Hunters Hill | Nineteenth century sandstone and early brick, with later additions | Solid plaster repair, lath and plaster assessment, cornice and ornament matching |
| Woolwich | Some of the oldest fabric in the municipality, on a narrow point | Careful repair rather than replacement, and access planned around tight streets |
| Gladesville | A broad mix of brick houses and post-war walk-up blocks | Everyday ceiling and wall repairs, cornice, and unit work inside strata buildings |
| Henley | River-edge housing, much of it altered and extended | Extension tie-ins, new linings meeting old, and ceilings after alterations |
| Huntleys Cove | Smaller pocket of later housing near the waterfront | Renovation linings, wet area lining and general plasterboard work |
| Huntleys Point | A small peninsula of mixed older and later homes | Repairs, re-lining and matching where two eras of construction meet |
Older systems
Four things that are not modern plasterboard
Each of these behaves differently when you cut it, fix to it or try to match it. Mistaking one for another is how an easy repair turns into a bad week.
Solid plaster on masonry
Render and set applied directly to brick or stone. Dull under a knuckle, no flex, no cavity. Patched with compatible material rather than filled like a board.
Lath and plaster
Timber laths across the joists with plaster pushed through from behind. Hollow but heavy, often with fine cracking in a net pattern. The question is always whether the keys are intact.
Fibrous plaster ornament
Cast cornice, roses and panels made off site and fixed up. Repairable and replicable, but that is a separate discipline from sheeting and setting a room.
Later board over older work
Plasterboard fixed over an earlier ceiling or wall at some point in the last fifty years. The join between the two is usually where the trouble starts.
Method
Repairing old plaster without making the problem bigger
Old plaster is unforgiving in one particular way. It will take a patch happily, and then fail somewhere else because of how the patch was done. A few rules save a lot of grief.
- Find the edge of the failure before deciding the size of the repair. Sound plaster next to loose plaster is not a boundary, it is the next thing to come down.
- Match the system, not just the look. A gypsum patch in the middle of a lime-based solid plaster wall will sit differently, dry differently and often read as a shadow later.
- Cut back in controlled sections. Solid plaster comes away in sheets if you let it, and on a ceiling that is both a mess and a hazard.
- Check what the fixings are going into. A hundred year old joist, a batten added in the sixties and a steel added last year all behave differently.
- Take the ornament off first where you can. A cornice section removed carefully is a template. The same section broken out with a bar is not.
- Accept that some of it cannot be matched exactly, and say so before the work starts rather than after the paint goes on.
Check what applies to your property before anything is removed
A large part of this municipality sits inside conservation areas, and individual properties can carry their own listings and controls. What that means in practice varies from house to house, and it can reach interior fabric as well as the outside of a building.
We are plasterers, not heritage consultants, and we will not tell you what you are permitted to do. What we will do is tell you what is original before it is disturbed, work to keep it where you want it kept, and hold off on anything irreversible until you have confirmed with the council or your architect that it is in order.
Quote inputs
What shapes a price on an older Hunters Hill house
Age changes the arithmetic. A repair on a 1970s wall is priced from its area. A repair on an 1890s wall is priced from what it turns out to be.
What is actually behind the paint
Until a small area is opened up, nobody can be certain whether it is solid plaster, lath or board. That uncertainty is usually handled with a staged quote rather than a guess.
Whether original fabric is being kept
Working around ornament and protecting it takes longer than removing it. It is generally the right call, and it belongs in the number.
How far the failure runs
Old plaster rarely fails only where you can see it. The repair is sized from the edge of the sound material, which is often wider than the stain or the crack.
Matching an existing profile
A standard cornice is fitted from stock. An original run has to be identified, and if it cannot be sourced it has to be reproduced from a good section.
Getting to the work
Narrow older streets, small frontages and tight side access are normal here, and they change how material is delivered and stored.
Whether other trades are coming
If electrical or plumbing work is planned, it is cheaper to have the plaster opened once and closed once than to do it twice.
Service pages that suit this area
- Solid plastering for render and set work on masonry walls inside the building
- Ornate plaster restoration for repairing, matching and replicating traditional ornament, roses and cornice detail
- Ceiling replacement where an old ceiling has lost its fixing and cannot be brought back
- Wall plastering and repairs for holes, impact damage, loose joins and non-structural cracking
- Cornice for fitting, repair and profile matching
- Skim coating to bring a much repaired wall or ceiling back to one plane
- Renovation plastering for re-lining and extension tie-ins in an occupied house
- Strata plastering for the walk-up blocks and common areas around Gladesville
Covered around here
Coverage across the lower North Shore and beyond is indexed on the NSW areas page.
Neighbouring council areas
Asked here
Questions about plastering an older peninsula house
These come up most often on houses built before plasterboard existed. A photo and a description of how the wall sounds when you tap it helps more than you would think.
How can I tell whether my walls are solid plaster or plasterboard?
Tap along the wall with a knuckle at about shoulder height. Plasterboard sounds hollow between the studs and solid where you hit one, and it gives very slightly. Solid plaster on brick or stone sounds dull everywhere and does not move at all.
The other clue is the fixings. If a picture hook goes in easily and holds, it is board. If it will not go in without a drill and a plug, you are on masonry with plaster over it. That difference decides the repair method, so it is worth checking before you describe the job to anyone.
Is it better to patch an old lath and plaster ceiling or replace it?
It depends entirely on whether the plaster is still keyed to the laths. When it is, small damage patches well and the ceiling has plenty of life left. When the keys have broken, the plaster is resting on the laths rather than held by them, and patching a section does nothing for the rest of it.
The signs are a ceiling that moves under light hand pressure, fine cracking spread across the whole plane rather than along a line, or areas that sound and feel heavy. If it has visibly dropped anywhere, keep people from under it and treat it as urgent.
Can a damaged section of original cornice be matched?
Often, and the odds depend on how much of the original survives. A clean, undamaged length of the same run is the best possible starting point, because it can be used to reproduce the profile. A few broken pieces in a bucket is a much harder brief.
So the useful thing you can do is protect what is left. Do not clear the debris until it has been looked at, and do not let another trade cut through a good run for convenience. The scoping for this kind of work is set out on the ornate plaster restoration page.
Our walls have been painted so many times the detail has gone soft. Can that be brought back?
On a moulded surface, partially. Successive coats of paint fill the crispness of an ornamental profile and there is a limit to what can be recovered without damaging what is underneath. That assessment has to happen on site, on the actual profile.
On flat walls the answer is more straightforward. Where a wall has been patched and repainted many times and now reads as uneven under a side light, a skim coat across the whole surface brings it back to one plane far better than another local repair.
Do you work in the walk-up blocks around Gladesville as well as the older houses?
Yes. A good share of the council area is ordinary unit and house repair work: ceiling cracks, water damage after a leak from above, wall patching and cornice. None of that needs a specialist approach.
Where the work is inside a strata building there is a second layer to sort out, which is building access and who is authorising the repair. That side of it is covered on the strata plastering page.
Hunters Hill
Tell us what the wall sounds like
A photo of the damage, plus whether the surface sounds hollow or solid when you tap it, tells us most of what we need to price it and to say whether it needs a specialist.