In article .com,
"Simon" writes:
Hi there,

I've just started to skim coat my bathroom. I've completed one whole
wall and it took me quite a while to complete. As I've got another two
walls to complete and very little time to do it in (a 5 year old and a
10 month old keeping me busy!) I was wondering whether I wold be
better off splitting the remaining walls into sections, using 3 mm
strips of wood as a guide? I could skim up to the wood, remove when
the plaster has hardened, then the next night complete another
section, merging the existing layer of platster into the new bi as I
go..... any comments / suggestions?

You can do this. Most houses have a wall which starts in the
downstairs hall runs up the stairs to the upstairs ceiling.
This is sometimes plastered in two pieces -- if you look
carefully, you will be able to see the boundary as it's
almost impossible to hide it completely. However, if you
never noticed it before explicitly looking, then it was
hidden well enough.

To make a join like this, don't use a batten, as the plaster
thickness always ends up increasing as you plaster up against
a batten (or into a corner). This will end up as ridges
running down the middle of the finished wall. Also, don't
make the join a straight line. Your eyes will easily pick out
a straight line mark or imperfection in the finished job,
which would not be noticable if it were a ragged join.

So simply don't lay the plaster on past a certain point. When
reworking and finishing, don't bother going right to the edge
of the plaster you layed. When you've finished polishing but
before the plaster is set hard, run a scraper or the end of
the trowel up the wall to remove the plaster edge which
isn't polished, remembering not to make this edge a
straight line. This should leave a clean step to run the
next area of plaster up against. If you are doing two skim
coats, cut the second back at least 6" from the edge of the
first so you have two separate steps to run the two coats
in the next area up to.

--
Andrew Gabriel
[email address is not usable -- followup in the newsgroup]