Sydney Plastering, done properly.

In Sydney the two words almost always describe the same person. A gyprocker is a plasterer who works with plasterboard, the sheet material lining the internal walls and ceilings of practically every Australian home built since the 1960s. Gyprock is a brand of that sheet, made by CSR, and the brand name attached itself to the trade in the same way Esky attached itself to cool boxes.

So if you are searching for someone to line a new house, repair a ceiling or patch a hole in a wall, plasterer and gyprocker will both find the right person. There is no job one of them does that the other does not.

The distinction that does still mean something is between plasterboard work and solid plastering, and that one is explained a few questions down.

On a new build or a renovation, we measure the job, supply and deliver the sheets, and fix them to the timber or steel frame. Then every joint, internal corner and fastener head is taped and set in successive coats, cornice goes on or the junctions are square set, and the whole surface is sanded flat and left ready for the primer.

On repair work it is narrower and considerably more diagnostic. Most of the job is working out why something failed before anything is touched. A ceiling that has dropped because of a roof leak and a ceiling that has dropped because the wrong board went onto joists at the wrong centres look similar from underneath and need entirely different repairs. Patching one as though it were the other is the single most common reason a repair comes back.

Painting is where we stop, and that is a boundary rather than an oversight. It is also the thing customers most often assume is bundled in, which is why it is worth saying twice on one page.

Dry plastering is plasterboard work. Sheets are fixed to a frame, the joints are taped and set with jointing compound, and the surface is sanded. It is what lines the inside of almost every modern Australian home, and it is quick, because the only thing that has to dry is the compound in the joints rather than the wall itself.

Solid plastering is the older method: wet render and set, applied by hand onto masonry. It is still the right answer on some heritage work and on rendered walls, and it takes much longer because the material has to cure properly before anything goes over it.

We are a dry plastering business. We do not render, we do not do solid or wet plastering, and we do not run or cast ornamental cornice profiles, which is a different trade again. If your job needs any of those we will tell you at the quote rather than halfway through, and we can usually point you towards someone who does that work.

Very little plastering in Sydney is actually sold by the hour, which is why an hourly rate is hard to find and not much use once you have one. The work is measurable, so it is priced by the square metre on anything of size and as a fixed figure on small jobs. An hourly rate would tell you almost nothing about your own job, because two walls of identical area can take very different amounts of time depending on access, the finish required and what is already behind them.

What actually moves a plastering price is the area of wall and ceiling, the finish level, whether any of it is wet area or fire rated sheeting, the ceiling height, and how easy the place is to get sheets into. A Sydney terrace with no side access and a narrow staircase is a different job from a new build with an open frame, before anybody picks up a tool.

If you want a figure before you speak to anybody, the plasterboard calculator on this site will give you a range worked out from your own room sizes.

Both. New home work is the largest part of what we do, but a single damaged wall, one dropped ceiling, or making good after a bathroom renovation is ordinary work and gets quoted the same way as anything else.

We will also tell you when a job is not worth paying somebody for. Small, clean damage in an easy spot is usually better handled with a patch kit and an hour of your own time, and we would rather lose that job than take the money for it.

Sanding is the messy part and no honest answer pretends otherwise. Jointing compound sands down to a very fine dust that gets further through a house than most people expect, including into rooms nobody has been working in. It is a thing to be managed rather than a thing to be promised away.

In an occupied house that means closing off the work area and covering the floor and anything staying in the room, because keeping the dust in one room is far easier than getting it back out of the rest of the house. When the work is finished the area is cleaned up and the offcuts and waste are cleared.

In an empty new build none of that applies and we simply work straight through.

Installation work carries a twelve month workmanship guarantee. If something we installed fails because of the way it was installed, we come back and put it right.

It is worth being exact about the scope, because guarantees in this trade get quoted loosely. It applies to our own installation work. It is not a cover-all on repair work carried out on somebody else's installation, and it is not a promise about what the building itself does. Where we think a crack or a sag is going to come back because of something behind the lining, such as movement in the structure or a leak that has not been fixed, we say so at the quote rather than afterwards.