Ceiling Repairs in Subiaco

Subiaco grew up around the railway from the 1890s, and the suburb's character comes from the brick and weatherboard homes that followed over the next thirty years: Federation villas and cottages, Edwardian bungalows, and the terraced workers' housing on the smaller lots. Ceilings from this period are either lath and plaster, where wet plaster was pressed through timber laths, or early fibrous plaster sheets reinforced with hessian and fixed to the joists. Both are now over a century old.

These ceilings are usually high, the cornices are deep and often decorative, and most rooms have a ceiling rose. Over the decades they have absorbed roof movement, a few leaks, sometimes a fire, and a long list of renovations that went above them to run power, data and ducted air conditioning. Cracking along the original joins, sagging where the plaster keys have broken away from the laths, and cornice pulling away from the wall are the standard problems.

Alongside the character stock there is plenty of newer building: apartments around the old Subiaco Oval site and the station precinct, townhouse infill on subdivided lots, and extensive rear extensions on the older homes. Those have plasterboard ceilings and modern problems, mainly water and settling cracks, but a big part of Subiaco work is making an old ceiling and a new one meet without a visible join.