Plastering in Cyprus.Compare several quotes at once.

Everything behind the wall becomes expensive on this day

Plastering is the moment a renovation becomes hard to change. Before it, a socket in the wrong place is a conversation. After it, it is chasing, patching, a drying wait and a repaint.

That makes the fortnight before the plasterer arrives the most decision-dense period of a domestic renovation, and it is usually the period when the homeowner is most tired of making decisions. The result is the classic renovation regret: not a bad finish, but a light switch on the wrong side of a door, no socket where the desk ended up, and no provision for something that was obviously coming.

The way to avoid it is to treat the pre-plaster walkthrough as a formal step rather than as a courtesy.

The pre-plaster walkthrough

Do this with the electrician and, where relevant, the plumber, in the actual rooms, with the furniture layout in mind.

Sockets. Where the bed goes, both sides. Where the desk goes. Behind the television, at the height it will hang. In the kitchen, against the appliances you have actually chosen rather than against a generic layout. Outside, if you use the terrace in the evening.

Switches. Which side of each door, and whether a room with two entrances needs two-way switching. This is the single most common thing people wish they had thought about.

Data and television. Even in a wireless household, a cable to where a router will sit and to any point that will carry a fixed device costs almost nothing while the wall is open.

Lighting positions. Ceiling points, and any wall lights, marked on the wall rather than described.

Fixings. Anything heavy that will hang — a large mirror, a television, wall units, a boiler — wants a fixing or a noggin behind the plaster rather than a plug into hollow block afterwards.

Air conditioning. Indoor unit positions, the pipe route to the outdoor unit, and the condensate drain. Retrofitting a condensate route through a finished wall is a job nobody enjoys.

Mark all of it on the walls in marker, photograph every wall before the plaster goes on, and keep those photographs. When somebody drills in three years, that record is what stops them hitting a pipe.

Patch or skim, and why the answer shows

Two ways to deal with a wall that has been chased and disturbed.

Patching fills the chases and makes good locally. It is cheaper and faster. It also leaves the wall as flat as it was, with new material next to old, and in raking light along a long wall the repairs are visible even when the work was competent.

Skimming takes the whole surface in one operation and gives you a single plane. It costs more, it takes longer to dry, and it is what makes a room look new rather than repaired.

The sensible rule: patch where the disturbance is limited and the existing surface is sound and flat; skim where a room has been rewired throughout, where the existing surface is uneven, or where the room matters visually. In a Cypriot flat being fully renovated, the difference in the finished result is larger than the difference in the quote.

Ceilings deserve their own decision. They catch light across their whole area, so imperfections show more than on walls, and a patched ceiling under a window is the surface a visitor sees first.

Living through it

Plastering is wet work and the water goes into your house.

Humidity rises throughout the property while it dries, condensation appears on cold surfaces that never showed it before, and the smell of damp plaster is persistent. In a Cypriot winter, with windows closed against the cold, this is worse than people expect. In summer it dries faster and the dust from the preparation is harder to contain.

Two practical decisions follow.

Where you live during it. If the whole property is being done, living elsewhere for the wet weeks is usually the honest answer. If part is being done, seal it properly — a taped sheet across a doorway rather than a door that gets opened.

Ventilation while it dries. Windows open where the weather allows, and airflow through rather than into a room. Drying is the part of the programme you can shorten by managing, and the only part.

The drying wait, and the argument it causes

This is where renovation programmes and decorators fall out.

Fresh plaster holds water, and cement-based work releases free alkali as well. Paint applied to either fails — blistering, patchy sheen, or a film that peels in sheets a few months later. The wall looks dry long before it is dry, because the surface dries first.

The interval depends on thickness, on the material, on the season and on the ventilation. It is longer for a thick cement render than for a thin skim, and longer in a closed-up house in January than in an open one in June.

Two things prevent the argument. Agree the interval in writing with both trades before either starts, so nobody is negotiating it while a decorator is standing in the hall. And where the programme cannot wait, use a mist coat appropriate to fresh plaster as an interim rather than the finish coat, and accept that the final coat comes later.

A renovation programme with a plastering stage in it should have the drying period drawn on it as a duration. Programmes that show plastering finishing on a Friday and decorating starting on a Monday are programmes that will slip or produce work that fails.

Where it sits in the whole sequence

The order that works in a Cypriot renovation:

Strip out and demolition. Any structural work. Windows, if they are being replaced, so the building is weathertight. First fix electrical and plumbing. Plastering. Drying. Screeds and floor preparation. Second fix. Decoration. Flooring. Final fix and snagging.

Two placements catch people out.

Windows before plaster, because a window replaced afterwards damages the reveals you have just paid for, and because the property needs to be closed against weather while the plaster dries.

Floor finishes after plaster, not before, because plastering is wet and dirty work carried out from a level surface, and a finished floor laid first is a finished floor being protected, walked on and occasionally damaged.

Taking it back to the block, or not

On an older Cypriot property there is a decision that sits above patch-or-skim: whether the existing plaster comes off entirely.

Arguments for removing it. It is hollow in places, which you find by tapping and which will not improve. It is salt-affected, in which case the salts stay in the material and keep pushing any new finish off. It is so uneven that skimming over it means a thick and expensive skim. Or the walls are being insulated internally, in which case it is coming off anyway.

Arguments against. Removal is dirty, slow and produces a large volume of waste, and it exposes whatever is behind — including surprises in the blockwork and services that were buried without records. On a sound wall it buys very little.

The test worth doing before deciding is simple and free: tap the wall across its area and listen for the hollow patches, and look along it in raking light from a torch held flat against the surface. Those two checks tell you whether you are dealing with a wall that needs stripping or one that needs skimming, and they take an evening.

Where the property is old enough to have lime plaster on stone, that decision changes again and belongs with somebody who works on those buildings. Removing lime and replacing it with cement on a wall built to breathe causes problems that appear later and elsewhere.

Details that decide how the room reads

Three small items account for most of the difference between a room that looks finished and one that looks done.

External corners. Beaded and straight, or slightly rounded and slightly off. On a long corridor a wavering corner is visible from the far end and cannot be corrected by decoration.

Window and door reveals. Square, consistent in depth, and returned neatly to the frame. Cypriot windows sit in deep reveals, so there is more of this detail per opening than in many countries, and it is where hurried work shows.

The junction with the ceiling. A crisp line, or a wavering one that draws the eye around the whole room. Where a coving or a shadow gap is being used, that decision belongs before plastering rather than after.

Ask to see these three on any previous job you are shown, and look at them in your own house before the plasterer leaves rather than after the scaffold and the trestles are gone.

What to agree with the plasterer

The extent — which walls and ceilings, patched or skimmed, room by room.

Whether preparation and chasing making-good is included, and whose chases they are dealing with.

Protection and dust control, and who provides it.

The drying interval before decoration, stated as a number of days for the conditions expected.

Whether the work is in one visit or staged, and what staging adds.

Who removes the waste, which on a full replaster is a meaningful volume.

Settle those and the plastering stage becomes what it should be: a week that happens, followed by a wait that was planned for.