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I recently responded to an email about cracks in lime plaster. The person reported seeing cracks through all three coats of plaster along the joint between the top of the bales and the wood box beam. She has tried a lime wash patch, which made things worse or at least more noticeable, and she was asking what to do. My response is below.
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Popularity: 9%

When you build with bales, one thing is almost 100% guaranteed: you will be plastering your walls. Knowing that, you may be surprised to discover that there is a cost that you should definitely put into your budget that may otherwise be overlooked. That cost is the electrical bill during the plastering phase.
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Popularity: 14%

There is a conversation happening right now on another list serve about woodpeckers destroying plaster on a house. This is not the first time I have heard of this. If you use earthen plasters that are based on local soils, you may encourage local birds to try and nest in your walls.
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Popularity: 12%

If possible, get any plaster that needs to be applied above the roof line in place before the finish roof is installed. If that is not possible, be sure to protect the roof from any dripped plaster. Once on a roof, especially a roof with texture like shingles, shakes, or clay tile, plaster is all but impossible to remove and the roof itself may need to be replaced in sections.
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Popularity: 11%

When working with natural plasters you need to remember that there are no chemical binders to help the plaster stick to the substrate. In most applications this does not matter; however, when plastering overhead (a ceiling or above a window) this becomes very apparent. In fact, it is not unusual to have more plaster land on your head than sticks to the lid!
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Popularity: 6%

It is not uncommon to have a place or two in a house where more plaster is needed. An obvious example is when spaces between the bales are left un-stuffed. Some of these holes can seem like never ending pits when you start laying plaster into them.
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Popularity: 5%

Plastering a home is messy. It may seem obvious to protect a finish floor like concrete from dropped plaster, but all too often I see homeowners forget to cover their electrical boxes before the plastering process. Once the boxes get filled with plaster, they are hard to clean out. Especially difficult are the tiny screw holes for the switches and plugs.
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Popularity: 4%

It is all too common for plaster to fill up electrical boxes and cause major headaches for the electricians during trim out. To avoid this, be sure to fully tape off all electrical boxes with red duct tape so that they will be well protected. The red helps locate them later should they get fairly well covered with plaster and the duct tape is strong enough to defend against a wayward trowel.
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When applying plaster to the bales, the fastest application may not be the best. There are two schools of thought in plastering. Some believe that the plaster adheres better to the bales when sprayed with a plaster gun and others believe a hand troweled application provides the best adherence. I personally believe that either application method will work well.
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Popularity: 4%

I received an email this morning from some folks in New Zealand. They are wondering if it is okay to leave the plaster off of the outside of a house if they wrap it with metal panels instead. I have attached their email below along with my response. In addition to my original response, I have thought of more to say on the subject. The additional information is noted here as well.
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Popularity: 4%

If possible, get any plaster that needs to be applied above the roof line in place before the finish roof is installed. If that is not possible, be sure to protect the roof from any dripped plaster. Once on a roof, especially a roof with texture like shingles, shakes, or clay tile, plaster is all but impossible to remove and the roof itself may need to be replaced in sections.
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Popularity: 8%

I have used integral color plaster on every straw bale house I have built and I have always wrestled with the pros and cons of doing so. Integral color plaster means that the final color for the wall is placed in the finish plaster coat. The wall surface that is created is both beautiful and strong. It is unlike any other finish I have seen. The problem with it is that patching holes and fixing blemishes is quite difficult.
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Popularity: 3%

I recently received an email asking if it was possible to get the interior walls of a SB house flat and smooth. I have included the email and my response to it below.

Question: Are there any alternatives to finishing the interior walls of a straw bale home with plaster? More specifically, can I do drywall or something similar that gives me the crisp, smooth, flat surface typical in most homes?

Answer: You could do the drywall on the interior of the house, but it would be a huge waste of time as there would be many extra steps necessary to achieve this.
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Popularity: 5%

When acid staining concrete floors, it is very important to properly mask off walls and doors so that none of the stain gets onto places where you don’t want it. One of the hardest surfaces to protect is unsealed plaster. The reason for this is the fact that it will try and wick the stain off of the floor if it gets behind the tape and plastic masking. That coupled with the fact that it can be hard to get a tights seal of the plastic and the tape to the wall makes for a dangerous situation.
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Popularity: 9%

I have had several clients of my consulting business call me after they started to plaster their straw bale house. The calls come with a similar voice over the phone: panic (sometimes mild and others extreme)! “My house is smelling musty.” That pretty much sums it up and you can imagine the concern. “Do I need to tear my walls out and start again?”
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Popularity: 4%

Today I visited the job site of a house we are currently plastering. I was glad I did because the plastering crew had removed the protection around the windows and the floor where it meets the wall so they could apply a clean finish coat and remove any debris around the tape from the scratch and brown coats. This is fine; however, they had begun plastering without replacing the protection.
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Popularity: 8%

Here’s a question I had about using American Clay over a brown coat of Natural Hydraulic Lime Plaster (NHL):

The plasterers did not get two interior walls brown coated this last time and we were wondering about the curing time of the NHL and the American Clay finish coat. Have you ever done a clay (or other material) as a finish coat over the NHL? Would 7 days be long enough to let the brown coat cure before putting on the final coat?
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Popularity: 3%

Today I spoke with a client who had a plaster company spill Natural Hydraulic Lime (NHL) all over their wood windows and trim. They asked how to deal with that as the lime had burned the wood and they could not remove the stains.
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Popularity: 3%