If you own a home anywhere from Chelsea up through the New Hampshire seacoast and into southern Maine, there's a good chance your walls are plaster, not drywall. And if you're renovating, someone has probably told you that plaster is obsolete and you should board everything over. That advice is usually wrong, and it's worth understanding why before you commit.
There are really three systems in play. Traditional lath-and-plaster is what you'll find in anything built before roughly 1950 — wet plaster pushed through gaps in wood lath, where it forms 'keys' that lock it in place. Veneer plaster is the modern successor: blueboard hung like drywall, then troweled with a thin, very hard plaster coat across the entire surface. Taped drywall is sheetrock where only the seams and screw heads get coated with compound.
The practical difference between veneer plaster and taped drywall comes down to how much of the wall is actually coated. On a taped drywall job, the paper face of the board is the finished surface across most of the wall, and the compound only covers the joints. That's why seams can telegraph through paint under raking light — you have different materials with different porosity sitting side by side. Veneer plaster coats everything uniformly, so the wall reads as one continuous surface, and it's meaningfully harder. Doorknobs, furniture, and kids do less damage to it.
Taped drywall still has its place. It's faster, it's less expensive, and for bedrooms, closets, and ordinary lighting conditions the difference is genuinely not worth paying for. Where veneer plaster earns its cost is on large open walls, rooms with big windows that throw light sideways across the surface, ceilings, and anywhere you're painting in satin or gloss.
Now, the old plaster already in your house. The most common failure we see is a ceiling starting to sag because the keys have broken away from the lath above. The second is long settlement cracks running from the corners of door and window openings. Neither one means the wall is finished. Sagging plaster can be re-secured to the lath, cracks can be cut out and properly re-bridged, and a skim coat over the whole surface brings everything back to flat. That's almost always cheaper and far less disruptive than demolition — and demolition on a house that old means dust, debris, and disturbing whatever else is in the wall.
One honest caveat: there's a point where repair stops making sense. If plaster has been soaked repeatedly, if it's crumbling to powder when you touch it, or if large areas have already come away from the lath, replacement is the right call. We'll tell you which situation you're in rather than selling you the more expensive one.
If you're weighing options on a renovation, we're glad to walk the space and give you a straight answer. Call JZ Plastering at (978) 751-0616 for a free written estimate.