Metro Detroit
Plaster Repair in Rochester, MI
Cracks, holes and tired walls returned to flat.
The older streets behind downtown Rochester carry walls from the 1880s through the 1920s. Real plaster, much of it with the slightly sanded, hand-floated surface of its era. Repairing it well means putting back what is there, not modernising it into a plane of glass-smooth drywall mud that matches nothing around it. The houses reward the care: few towns this size kept this much original fabric, and the plaster is the fabric, these walls are themselves the antique, and repairing them well is preservation at its most practical. We treat every stair hall and parlor ceiling accordingly.
Settlement is the local signature
These houses have been settling gently for a century, and their plaster records it: stair-stepping cracks off door heads, long diagonals at corners, the classic map around the staircase. We read the pattern first. Stable old settlement gets repaired and reinforced; movement that looks fresh gets flagged before we hide the evidence under a fill.
Texture matching is the craft
A Victorian wall was floated by hand and it shows. A soft, faintly sanded surface with life in it. A repair floated dead flat announces itself in raking light down a hallway. We match the float of the existing surface so the repair reads as wall, not as patch.
Repair before repaint, always
A repaint over cracked plaster is money spent on postponement. The paint bridges the crack for a season and re-tears along the same line. On these houses the plaster work is the foundation of the paint job, which is why having one crew do both is not a convenience. It is the quality control.
Not all lath is the same
Rochester's plaster spans eras: split and sawn wood lath in the Victorian houses, early gypsum board lath in the later ones. They fail differently, wood-lath plaster loses keys, board-lath plaster delaminates in sheets, and the repair that saves one wastes money on the other. Knowing which wall you own is the first ten minutes of our visit.
Plaster Repair & Restoration questions in Rochester
The previous owners wallpapered over the cracks. Now what?
Very Rochester. The paper comes off, the wall underneath gets honestly assessed, paper has hidden anything from hairlines to failed fields, and repaired to one plane before any finish goes on. Skipping the assessment is how paper goes back up.
Do you do small plaster jobs, or only whole rooms?
Both. One ceiling, one stair wall, one door head that keeps cracking. Small repairs done properly are most of this trade, and they are how most of our Rochester clients found us.
A wall on our stairwell is bulging. Is that urgent?
Treat it as urgent to assess, yes. A bulge means the plaster has separated from its lath and is holding on by habit, over a stairwell, that is exactly where you do not want a field letting go. Stabilising it early is a modest job; cleaning up after it fails is not.
Can the ceiling medallion be saved?
Almost always. Original medallions and run cornice are exactly the fabric worth working around. We stabilise them, repair the field up to their edges, and clean rather than replace. A house that kept its medallion for a century should not lose it to a repair.
In Rochester?
Let's talk about your plaster repair & restoration
Estimates are free, and we'll give you an honest date rather than an optimistic one.