Q:We have a small 1924 cottage in the El Cerrito flatlands a little east of the El Cerrito Mall. Our lot has a minor slope, and we have a high water table. Our house continues to shift and settle, ...

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 just bought our first house, an American Foursquare, dated 1917. It has been vacant for several years and the interior is not in the best condition. We'd like to gut it to get rid of the sagging ...

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? — ...

Read Part 1, Part 2 and Part 4 of this story. So you live in an older home with plaster walls and ceilings, and you need to renovate. You need to run new electric lines, or repair plumbing, or perhaps ...

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 ...

Houses around Reading will have many sorts of walls from plastered brick and mortar to stud walling with lath and plaster or plasterboard. Putting fixings into some walls presents DIYers with an ...

At the turn of the 20th century, plaster was the most popular interior wall covering in North America, and it remained so for the next several decades. But things have changed since then. Drywall, ...

Read Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4 of this story. When it comes to real estate in a city like ours, with housing that spans the space of a few hundred years, there are two types of people in the world: ...

Q I live in a ground-floor conversion flat in an 1875 house. A small section – about 3 sq m – of the original lath-and-plaster ceiling has fallen, together with a length of highly decorative cornice.