Drywall built America faster, but contractors knew what homeowners were giving up.

Q: The walls of our 1938 San Francisco home are lath and plaster, with a canvas-like fabric over the plaster. There are cracks in the plaster, which can be seen through the paint as raised creases in ...

Q. We're buying a house that is probably close to 100 years old. It has been vacant for the past several years and needs a good amount of cleaning up and fixing up. One thing we're concerned about is ...

Dear James: We are planning a substantial room addition to our dream home. We are not on a tight budget, and we want everything done right. Should we use plaster walls or standard drywall walls? — ...

Save the plaster! This might have been the rallying cry of Julia Child, were she a preservationist rather than a chef. “Preserving nice plaster work, if possible, is always worth it,” reBUILD Workshop ...

Drywall is common and ubiquitous in commercial and residential buildings today. Many of us barely think about it until we have to repair a hole smashed in it. However, drywall has not been around ...

Traditional three-coat plaster walls were engineered with a laminated system that gave them compressive strength closer to soft concrete than modern drywall. Plaster's dense mass reduces sound ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. And if all the decorative perks of textured plaster walls aren't enough, turns out they're also long lasting and environmentally ...

Q. My wife and I removed beadboard wainscoting in a house we just bought. In the process we destroyed the wall. The beadboard was glued on, and when it came down, so did a thin coat of something. I ...

Plaster, a decorative wall coating of lime, sand, and sometimes fibers, has been around since the beginning of time—and so has plaster repair. Although subject to cracks and bubbles, it's a durable ...