The only thing worth judging a plasterer on is the wall when he is finished. Not the truck, not the years, not the words on a website — the wall. So here are some of them.
The gallery
A mix of commercial and residential. Some of it is decorative work built out over brick; some of it is a whole elevation applied from scratch.
These are jobs we photographed ourselves. More go up as they come in.
How to judge the work
Whoever you end up hiring, ask to see their work. Four kinds of photograph get shown, and they are not equally useful — knowing which is which tells you a great deal about who you are talking to.
Shot from roughly the same spot, so nothing gets hidden by a change of angle or a kinder time of day. The before half is the honest half — the crack, the stain, the soft spot, the run of dirt below a joint that let go. Anybody can photograph a finished wall.
Building paper lapped and lath fastened up, mesh embedded at a corner bead, the scratch coat combed, the brown coat rodded flat, a finish being floated. These are the parts of the job that stop being visible the moment the last coat goes on.
Sand, dash, lace, knockdown, skip trowel, smooth. A patch gets judged from six feet away, and the close‑up is where a texture match either holds up or does not. Color‑matched sealant at a window return or a hose bib belongs in here too — that is where the water was getting in.
The whole wall, stepped back far enough to see it the way the street sees it. Holding line, plane and color across a full elevation is a different skill to a good patch, and it only reads from that distance.
A finished wall looks about the same whether what is under it was done right or not. That is the whole trouble with judging stucco by its finish coat: a wall that will fail in four years and a wall that will still be sound in thirty can come off the scaffold looking identical.
What separates them is underneath. Whether the water‑resistive barrier was lapped shingle‑style so water running down the back of the wall is carried out instead of in. Whether the lath was fastened into framing and not just into sheathing, and lapped the right way so it does not telegraph a grid of cracks through the finish. Whether mesh was embedded in the base coat at the corners and openings rather than laid on top of it. Whether the weep screed at the bottom was left clear of grade and mulch so the wall can actually drain, which is the one detail that quietly decides how long everything above it lasts.
None of that is visible on the finished wall. It is only visible while the wall is still open. So if you are weighing up two quotes and one of them will walk you through what goes on behind the finish — the barrier, the lath, where the mesh sits, how the bottom of the wall drains — that is worth more than a folder of photographs of finished houses.
Send a photo and we will tell you what you are looking at — what system it is, what is likely causing it, and whether it needs doing now.
