Servants' Staircase Plastering

For some time, the restoration project at Balintore Castle has been in need of a push on the plastering front. We have been using local plasterers who have kindly donated their evenings and weekends to move things forward gradually, but the larger plastering jobs such as the walls of the servants' staircase have gone untouched.

This is where Joe the plasterer from Airdrie comes in. :-) He sent me an unsolicited email out of the blue, saying he would like to work on the Balintore project, having read a newspaper article about the restoration. As ever offers of help are just that, and it is rare that people actually follow through. However, I believe in giving everyone a chance to prove themselves, and it turns out that Joe is the real deal and he has now been working here for 4 weeks.

Joe says that Balintore is the "Wimbledon" of the plastering world i.e. a chance to make a contribution that means something and that will still be around (fingers crossed) in another couple of hundred years time. Naturally, I am now creatively dismissive about other plastering jobs: "That's just the French Open, Joe!".

Anyhow for now, it's like the universe has cosmically ordered a Joe just when the castle was needing a large amount of plastering done, and Balintore, to mix too many sporting metaphors into the pot, has caught a wave. Let's see how long Ms. Balintore can ride Joe's surfboard. 

I realised that I was not recording the plastering progress in the blog, and today's entry is an attempt to redress this.

Looking towards the upper bedroom floor:

 

You can see the newest plasterwork on the facing wall - brown indicates the plaster is still wet. The left hand wall is also newly plastered and has just dried to that peach colour.

Looking towards the lower bedroom floor:

The far wall and the wall on the left have been newly plastered. The wall on the right has still to be plastered, but Joe has put on some bonding plaster between the original concrete render at the bottom and the new plasterboard at the top.

Looking towards the principal floor:

The far wall has been newly plastered, but the left and right and walls have still to be started.

You can see that Joe is working his way down the servants' staircase. The walls are enormously high, and Joe has been working off scaffolding and off ladders. When the staircase is blocked by scaffolding, moving between floors sometimes requires going up and down different staircases, so one is expending even more effort than usual. Needless to say, one simply postpones unnecessary journeys as a result. :-)

Anyhow, the photos above form a real snapshot of the plastering work in progress: some walls are completed; some walls are work-in-progress; and others have yet to be started. I was considering getting a plastering firm in to "blitz" the servants' staircase. However, I am delighted that Joe is having a go on his own, though he wistfully describes some of the work at the castle as "two trowel" jobs which I presume means he would like some help from a colleague. :-)

Joe is forever troweling up plastering lingo which is like a foreign language to me. He was going to "dot and dab" but has now thought the better of it, and is instead waiting to pounce on my "ingos". :-)