Plastering a wall: the Mary Berry method

I've plastered over many a crack and screw hole in my time, and more than a few grooves too that had been chased in walls for electrical cables. Never before, though, have I tackled a big hole like this one. This is where the fuse board used to be before my house was rewired. You can see the new distribution board on the left.

Fortunately, my great friend B had recently prevailed upon her son to re-plaster one of her bedrooms, so she was able to send me home with me a nice piece of left-over plasterboard and a ¼ bag of thistle. Before planning this job, I thought that thistle was something you accidentally sat upon whilst resting on a long walk, but I'm learning fast.  It's plaster. And if you think my plaster-boarding looks a bit rough, just remember that there's nothing but a big hole behind most of it. Tricky, I'm sure you'll agree.

I've never used 'real' plaster before, but only Polyfilla, and hadn't a clue what to do next, so I watched a couple of YouTube videos. There were electric stirrers, plasterers' hawks and hunky guys who made it look very easy, but they were plastering whole walls – not big holes like mine. I told myself, however, that it surely can't be much more complicated than icing a Christmas Cake so, in the words of Mary Berry's recipe for Royal Icing:

Beat the icing until it is very stiff and stands up in peaks.

The silly look is because, by this time,
that's how I was feeling.

I added water to a few trowels-full of plaster until mine too stood up in peaks and with this I roughly filled the hole. I quickly discovered that any 'new' plaster that gets on the 'old' dries rapidly, so I filled a window cleaner bottle with water and kept squirting to keep the old wall damp. It worked.

My plastering now resembled the peaks and troughs of a roughly iced Christmas Cake and would have reduced a professional plasterer to tears, but I pressed on, undeterred.

If you want a smooth icing you may need to thin the icing down a little...

Sounded simple enough, Mary, so I thinned down my plaster, kept squirting water and set about smoothing it out with a big flat trowel. The trick seemed to be to wait for the plaster to set a bit, give it a squirt or two, smooth it again, wait again... etc, and add little dollops of sloppy plaster to fill in any left-over low bits as I went along. Yes – just like smoothing out that Christmas Cake.

Well, a plasterer I shall never be (nor ever wish to be) but I'm still rather proud of my efforts. The next job will be to stick in place some new polystyrene architrave to match the stuff on the other side of the distribution board, then comes the easy bit – painting it all. A nice pastel shade of blue, I think.