Find a Plasterer Sydney NSW - What to Check and Get Quotes

Finding a Plasterer in Sydney, Job by Job

A plastering quote in Sydney is mostly two numbers in a trench coat. There is the cost of sheeting, setting and finishing the surface, which is reasonably predictable per square metre, and there is the cost of everything that has to happen before anybody opens a bucket. Indicative plastering costs across New South Wales give you the first number, and the second one is where two quotes on the same room end up hundreds of dollars apart. That preparation number is driven by what is already on the wall. A sample test of the existing sheeting costs $80 to $160 and settles the question in a couple of working days, which is cheap compared with finding out halfway through. Pre war interiors with lath and lime plaster behind the paint are the other surprise, and the choice there is a like for like lime repair or taking the wall back and relining, with the two prices a long way apart.

The rest of it is arithmetic you can check. Wall and ceiling repairs run $180 to $420 for a small patch, new walls sit at $35 to $70 per square metre, and ceiling sheeting runs higher at $45 to $90 because overhead work is slower and usually needs two people. Cornice is priced by the metre at $18 to $45 according to profile, with reproduction runs above that. One room at around twelve square metres comes in at $1,400 to $3,200, and a three bedroom whole house re sheet runs $9,000 to $22,000. Render and texture coating is a different trade on a different substrate and sits at $55 to $120 per square metre.

Height, difficult access and working around a family living in the house each carry a real loading, and all three reflect lost productivity rather than padding. Two sequencing items are worth pricing up front rather than discovering them later. The waterproofing membrane has to go on a sound substrate and cure before tiling, so the areas being tiled do not want a decorative set at all. And painting over new work needs a sealer across the whole surface first, because fresh compound and sheet face drink paint at different rates. Agree in writing which trade applies that sealer, since both of them will assume the other has it.

The Plastering Jobs People Actually Ring About

Most calls to a Sydney plasterer fall into a handful of familiar categories, and knowing which one you have helps you ask for the right thing. Patch and crack repair sits at the small end, covering a doorway corner that has opened up, a hole left by a removed shelf, or a cracked join above a window. These jobs are measured in hours of actual work, although the drying time between coats stretches them across more than one visit. A tradesperson will often group several small patches into a single booking to make the trip worthwhile.

A sagging or water damaged ceiling is the next step up in scale and the one that carries some urgency. Water from a failed shower tray, a cracked roof tile or a split flexible hose will stain and soften plasterboard, and softened board loses its grip on the fixings holding it up. Repair might mean cutting out a single damaged sheet and reinstating the joins, or it might mean the whole ceiling once the full extent becomes visible. A full room re-sheet, where every wall and the ceiling are stripped back to frame and relined, is a two to four day job for a standard bedroom. Renovation work adds new walls, which means framing or at least battening, then sheeting, then setting, then cornice or a square set edge. Each of those involves more coordination with other trades, so the plastering date depends on the carpenter and the electrician finishing first.

Cornice repair and replacement is its own category and frequently misunderstood by homeowners. Older Sydney houses carry profiles that are no longer stocked, so matching a run in a hallway can mean sourcing a similar profile or accepting a visible difference at the join. Skim coating over damaged walls is the other common request, applied where paint has been stripped badly, where old wallpaper has torn the paper face, or where decades of patching have left an uneven surface. A skim coat is a thin layer of compound across the whole surface that resets the wall, and it costs considerably less than replacing the sheeting underneath. Choosing between a skim and a re-sheet usually comes down to whether the board itself is still sound.

What a Crack Is Telling You Before Anybody Patches It

A crack is information before it is a defect, and reading it correctly saves money on repairs that will not hold. Hairline cracks that follow a plasterboard join, sit above a doorway, or run a short distance out from a window corner are usually the result of ordinary settlement and seasonal movement. Those are cosmetic, and taping, filling and sanding will generally hold them for years. Cracks wider than roughly two or three millimetres, cracks that run diagonally across a wall, and cracks you can see daylight through belong in a different conversation entirely.

The width of a crack is less telling than its pattern and whether it is still changing. Stair-step cracking in brickwork, where the crack follows the mortar joints in a diagonal staircase pattern, points at foundation movement and not at the plaster. The same applies to cracks that are noticeably wider at one end, cracks appearing on both the inside and the outside of the same wall, and doors or windows that have begun to bind in their frames. Sydney sits on large areas of reactive clay, particularly through the west and the south west, and that clay swells in wet weather and shrinks in dry weather. Houses on reactive soils move seasonally, which is why a crack can close up over summer and reopen after a wet autumn. Expansion in masonry and shrinkage in new timber framing produce their own cracks during the first year or two after building work.

A plasterer can fill any of these, but filling does nothing about the movement that created them. A reliable signal that you need a structural opinion first is a crack that has already been patched and has come back. Repeating that repair simply buys another few months of quiet at the same price each time. A structural engineer or building consultant will look at the footings, the drainage, the subfloor ventilation and the trees near the house before anybody touches the plaster. Fixing the cause, often something as mundane as a downpipe discharging against the footing, is what makes the following patch permanent.

A Sagging Ceiling: Repair, Overboard or Replace

Ceilings sag for a small number of reasons, and the cause determines whether you are looking at a repair or a replacement. In houses built from the nineteen sixties onward, plasterboard ceilings were typically held by screws or nails into the joists along with daubs of stud adhesive between them. Adhesive loses strength over decades of heat cycling in a Sydney roof space, and once it releases the sheet hangs from the fixings alone. Water is the other common cause, whether from a roof leak, a bathroom above or a burst pipe, because wet plasterboard swells, loses stiffness and never fully recovers.

Inadequate original fixing, where the installer relied too heavily on adhesive and used too few screws, shows up as a gentle belly in the middle of a sheet. A sagging ceiling is a safety matter and not simply an aesthetic one, because a full sheet of thirteen millimetre plasterboard across a bedroom weighs enough to injure somebody. Visible signs include a bulge that casts a shadow in raking light, screw heads popping through the paint, cracking along the sheet joins, and a hollow sound when you tap the surface. If a ceiling is sagging more than about ten millimetres, or if the sag is spreading, keep people out of the room and have it looked at promptly.

Insulation sitting on top of the sheets adds weight, and ceilings in older homes often carry decades of accumulated dust and debris above them as well. Overboarding means fixing a new layer of plasterboard straight over the existing ceiling, screwing through into the joists above, then setting and finishing the new surface. It is faster, much less messy and cheaper than a strip out, and it avoids disturbing whatever sits in the ceiling space. The trade-off is that it adds weight and thickness, lowers the ceiling slightly, needs cornice and sometimes light fittings reworked, and does nothing about ongoing water. Taking the ceiling down is the answer where the board is water damaged, where the sag is severe, where insulation needs replacing, or where the roof space needs attention anyway. The test is simple enough to describe: sound dry board can be covered over, while wet, crumbling or badly deflected board has to come out.

How Smooth Is Smooth: What Finish Level Actually Means

Finish level describes how much work goes into the surface once the sheets are on the wall, and it is a major variable in any plastering price. A standard domestic finish means the joins are taped and coated, the screw heads are filled, and the whole lot is sanded flat enough to paint under ordinary room lighting. A higher finish adds further coats, wider feathering of the joins, and often a full skim across the entire surface so that jointed areas and open sheet face reflect light identically. The numbering system people quote for these finishes, the levels running from a bare taped surface up to a full skim, comes from manufacturer technical literature and industry guides, not from a published Australian Standard. That matters in practice, because two quotes can cite the same level number and mean slightly different things by it.

Critical lighting is the reason the higher finishes exist at all. Light striking a wall at a shallow angle, from a window at the end of a hallway, a downlight close to the wall or a wall washer in a stairwell, throws a shadow off any ridge or hollow. A join that is invisible under a central ceiling light will read as a long shallow bump when the same wall is lit from the side. Gloss and semi-gloss paints exaggerate the effect, while flat paints in deeper colours hide more, so look at where the light will actually fall before settling on a finish.

Square set, where the wall meets the ceiling in a sharp plastered angle with no cornice, is the other decision in the same conversation. It suits contemporary interiors, but it demands a straighter frame, a more accurate ceiling line and more careful setting, so it costs more per metre than fitting a cornice. Cornice hides small discrepancies between wall and ceiling, which is part of why it has stayed popular in Australian housing for so long. A practical approach puts the higher finish in living areas, hallways with end windows and anywhere with feature lighting, while bedrooms, robes, laundries and garages take a standard finish. The same wall therefore carries three or four different prices depending on which of those you choose, which is why a quote with no stated finish level tells you very little.

Arches, Curves, Bulkheads and Ceiling Roses

Decorative plasterwork is a separate skill set from sheeting a bedroom, and not every plasterer takes it on. Sydney has a great deal of it, because the Federation and interwar housing through the inner west, the lower north shore and the eastern suburbs was built with ceiling roses, deep run cornices, picture rails and arched hallway openings. Repairing a damaged ceiling rose means either sourcing a cast reproduction close enough to pass or taking a mould from the surviving section and casting a replacement. The second option costs considerably more and is the only one that matches exactly, which is the choice worth making consciously rather than discovering halfway through. Curved and arched work in new building is a different proposition again, since plasterboard will bend to a surprisingly tight radius once it is scored or wetted, and a curved bulkhead over a kitchen bench or a rounded wall return is ordinary work for somebody who does it regularly. The cost sits in the framing and the setting rather than the sheet, because a curve has to be framed accurately before anybody lines it and the setting has to be worked by hand in several passes.

Expect a curved bulkhead to cost several times what the equivalent straight run would, and ask for it priced as its own line. Where a house still carries original lath and lime plaster behind the paint, which is common in anything built before roughly the nineteen forties, the repair decision changes shape entirely. Patching lime plaster with modern compound sets up a hard spot against a soft surround and the join cracks again within a season or two. The honest options are a like for like lime repair by somebody who works in it, or taking the wall back and relining in plasterboard, and the two prices are a long way apart. Ask any plasterer quoting on a pre war interior what they intend to do where the old plaster meets the new, because the answer tells you how much of this work they have actually done.

Dust, Mess and Living Through It

Plaster dust is far finer than sawdust or brick dust, and it behaves more like smoke than like grit, drifting through doorways, settling on top of picture frames and working into a laptop keyboard in the next room. It will also be drawn through a ducted air conditioning system if the return is left open during the work. The cutting and sheeting stage produces offcuts and a little airborne dust, and the setting stage is relatively clean because the compound goes on wet. Sanding is where the real mess happens, and sanding a whole room will coat every horizontal surface in the house unless it is properly contained. Sensible preparation treats that single stage as the one worth planning around.

Containment starts with sealing the work area, taping plastic over doorways and covering or closing air conditioning vents with tape around the gaps. Hard floors should be covered with builders paper or hardboard, and carpet should be covered with adhesive film or lifted entirely if it is being replaced anyway. Furniture that cannot leave the room should be centralised, wrapped in plastic and then covered again with drop sheets, because dust finds any gap in a single layer. Removing curtains, blinds and soft furnishings from the room beforehand saves a great deal of cleaning afterwards. Dust extraction sanding, where the sanding head runs with a vacuum attached, captures most of the airborne dust at the source and is worth asking about for occupied houses.

It costs a little more in labour and equipment, and it makes staying in the house considerably more tolerable. One room is effectively out of use from the first day of sheeting until the last coat has been sanded and the floors are uncovered. Compound coats need time, typically overnight between coats in warm dry conditions and longer when the air is cold or damp, which is why a small job spreads across several days. You can usually stay in the house for patch work, a single ceiling or one room, provided the work area is sealed and you have a usable bathroom and kitchen elsewhere. A whole house re-sheet is different, and many people move out, or at least move the more sensitive members of the household out, for the duration. Keep pets away from the work area entirely, since the dust irritates their airways and wet compound on paws goes straight onto the carpet.

How Long It Actually Takes

Plastering looks quick while it is happening and then appears to stop for days, which is where most scheduling frustration comes from. Understanding the difference between working hours and elapsed days makes a quoted timeframe much easier to judge. A single small patch is perhaps an hour of actual work spread across two or three visits, because each coat has to dry before the next one goes on. One ceiling in a standard room runs two to three days from sheeting to final sand, and a full room with walls and ceiling is typically three to five days. A three bedroom house re-sheet sits somewhere between two and four weeks depending on size, access and how much framing correction is needed.

The labour inside all of those figures is only a fraction of the elapsed time. The schedule is built around waiting, in a fixed sequence of set, dry, sand and re-coat, repeated two or three times along the joins. Setting compounds come in versions with different working times, and a fast setting product can shorten a stage, but the final coats still want proper drying before sanding. Sanding a coat that has not fully dried tears the surface and clogs the abrasive, and painting over compound that still holds moisture leads to flashing and later cracking. Humidity is the controlling factor, so a cold damp Sydney week in July will add days to the same job that moves briskly in February. Rooms with no airflow, internal bathrooms and closed up houses dry slowly whatever the season happens to be.

Rushing the sequence produces the failures people blame on workmanship years later, because hairline cracks appearing along the joins a few months after painting usually trace back to coats applied over compound that had not finished shrinking. For planning purposes, assume three separate visits across a week for work that sounds like a single day, and build that into any arrangement with painters or flooring installers. Tell the plasterer about hard deadlines early, since there are legitimate ways to compress the programme, including fast setting compounds, dehumidifiers and fans, and those need to be priced in. Booking a painter for the morning after the final sand is where a great many renovation timelines come apart.

Getting the Room Ready

Plasterers price on the assumption that they can reach the surfaces without working around your belongings, so preparation directly affects what you pay. The difference between an empty room and a furnished one shows up as both labour hours and risk of damage. Empty the room if you can, and if you cannot, move everything to the centre, leaving at least a metre of clear floor along every wall. Trestles and benches need that space, and a plasterer working off a ladder squeezed between furniture works slower and achieves less.

Cover centralised furniture in plastic and then drop sheets, and take out anything genuinely valuable or difficult to clean. Wardrobes and bookshelves standing against a wall being sheeted have to move regardless, so deal with them before the first morning. Flooring deserves a decision of its own well before anybody turns up with sheets: carpet that is staying should be covered with adhesive protection film or lifted and rolled back, and timber or tile floors want builders paper taped at the edges with hardboard over the traffic routes. Remove wall fixings, picture hooks, shelf brackets, television mounts and curtain tracks, and do not bother filling the holes yourself, because the plasterer will deal with them properly. Light fittings, ceiling fans, air conditioning heads and smoke alarms in a ceiling being replaced need an electrician to disconnect them, and that has to be organised in advance.

Where fittings are staying in place, point them out clearly so that nobody puts a sheet edge through a pendant. On the practical side, the plasterer needs working power, a tap for water, decent lighting and somewhere to park within carrying distance of the door. Sheets of plasterboard are long and heavy, so a narrow Sydney terrace entry, a tight stair turn or a first floor with no balcony changes how material gets in and may need two people or a hoist. Mention difficult access, permit zones, resident parking restrictions and strata loading dock bookings when you ask for the quote, not on the day. Keep pets closed away in another part of the house, both for the dust and because open compound buckets and offcuts are hazards. Agree where offcuts and rubbish will be stacked and who is removing them, since a room re-sheet generates a surprising volume of waste.

Telling Fibrous Cement From Plasterboard Before Anybody Cuts

Plasterboard and asbestos cement sheeting behave differently enough that an experienced plasterer can often form a view, and that view is not a substitute for a test. Plasterboard is soft, takes a fingernail mark, sounds hollow and has a paper facing that shows at a cut edge. Asbestos cement is hard, brittle, has no paper layer and often shows a faint dimpled or fibrous texture on the reverse face where it was not painted. Thickness and the fixing pattern help with the question as well.

Older fibrous cement sheeting in Sydney housing is commonly four to six millimetres thick and fixed with small galvanised clouts at close centres, often with cover strips over the joins. Modern plasterboard runs ten or thirteen millimetres and is screwed or nailed with recessed joints taped and set flush. None of this settles the question on its own, and that is the honest position. The only answer that holds is a laboratory result on a sample, which is why testing and inspection comes before the plastering quote rather than after it on any Sydney house of that era.

Bathrooms and Laundries: Which Board Goes Where

Wet areas use a different lining from the rest of the house, and getting it wrong is expensive because it only shows up once the tiles start to drum. Water resistant plasterboard, usually green or blue faced depending on the brand, goes on the walls of a bathroom, laundry or powder room. Fibre cement sheet is the heavier option and is what most Sydney tilers prefer behind a shower, since it is dimensionally stable and takes a waterproofing membrane without movement. Ceilings in a bathroom take a moisture resistant board as well, because steam condenses on a cold ceiling far more than people expect. The order of trades in a wet area is where renovations most often come apart. Sheeting goes on, then the waterproofer applies the membrane and it cures, then the tiler works over the top, and none of those stages can be compressed without consequence.

Your plasterer should not be setting and sanding joins in an area about to be waterproofed, because the membrane needs a sound substrate rather than a decorative finish, and the areas being tiled do not need a smooth set at all. Where the shower wall meets a dry wall, the junction has to be worked out before anybody sheets, since the two boards sit at slightly different thicknesses. Ventilation sits underneath all of this and it is the thing homeowners can actually control. An exhaust fan ducted into the roof space rather than out through the eave or the roof simply moves the moisture into the ceiling cavity, and the plasterboard up there pays for it. If a bathroom ceiling has sagged or stained once already, check where the fan discharges before paying anybody to replace the sheet. Any plasterer worth hiring will spot that during a quote, and a good one will tell you, because they would rather not come back to the same ceiling in three years.

Plastering in a Unit: Access, Lifts and Noise Hours

Plastering an apartment carries a layer of logistics that a freestanding house does not, and those logistics turn up in the price whether or not anybody itemises them. Sheets of plasterboard are two point four or two point seven metres long, they do not turn corners easily, and getting them into a fourth floor unit means either a lift large enough to take them upright at an angle or a stair carry with two people. Many buildings require a lift booking, protective blankets fitted to the lift car, and a nominated loading dock window that may be as short as two hours. Ask the building manager for those conditions before you ask a plasterer for a price. Noise and working hours are the second constraint, since most Sydney strata schemes limit noisy work to weekday business hours with a shorter window on Saturdays and nothing on Sundays. Sanding is the noisy and dusty stage, and a plasterer who can only work six hours a day instead of nine will take proportionally longer.

Common property matters too: the ceiling in a unit is often common property above a certain line and the wall between two units usually is, which affects who approves the work and occasionally who pays for it. Getting written approval from the owners corporation before a tradesperson is booked avoids the expensive version of this conversation. Practical preparation in a unit is mostly about containment and neighbours. Seal the doorway and cover the hallway carpet from the lift to your door, because dust carried on boots into common property is the complaint that ends jobs early. Tell the two neighbours either side and the one below what is happening and roughly how long for, which costs nothing and defuses most of it. Where the building has a ducted or shared ventilation system, cover the return and the vents, since fine plaster dust travelling through shared ductwork is a problem you do not want attributed to you.

Handing Over to the Painter: What Paint Ready Means

The handover between plasterer and painter is where a surprising amount of money goes missing, because each trade has a different idea of where their work stops. A plasterer leaves the surface set, sanded and dusted off, which is not the same thing as ready for a topcoat. New plasterboard and fresh compound absorb paint at very different rates, so the first thing on the wall has to be a sealer or primer across the whole surface rather than a first coat of colour. Where that step is skipped, the jointed areas drink the paint and the sheet face does not, and the result is a wall where every join reads through the finish in the right light.

Agree in writing which trade applies that sealer, because both of them will assume the other has it. Most painters price it as part of their preparation on new work, and most plasterers do not include it unless asked, so the gap is easy to fall into when you have engaged the two separately. The same applies to the final dust clean, the removal of floor protection and filling the small dings that appear once furniture comes back in. None of those items is expensive, and all of them cause arguments when nobody has claimed them.

Timing matters as much as scope on this handover. Compound needs to be genuinely dry before it is sealed, and sealing over compound still holding moisture leads to flashing, poor adhesion and hairline cracking along the joins a few months later. In a cold damp Sydney week that can mean waiting several days longer than the plasterer originally allowed. Book the painter with a day or two of slack rather than for the morning after the final sand, and ask the plasterer directly whether the surface is dry rather than assuming the absence of a phone call means it is.

What Plastering Costs Around Sydney

Sydney plastering prices move with access, finish level, height and whether the house is occupied, so treat any figure as indicative and not as a quote. New plasterboard walls supplied and installed commonly run $35 to $70 per square metre, while ceiling sheeting sits higher at $45 to $90 per square metre because overhead work is slower and usually needs two people. Cornice is priced by the metre according to profile, generally $18 to $45 per metre, with ornate and reproduction profiles at the upper end of that range or beyond it. Render and texture coating, applied to masonry instead of plasterboard, falls around $55 to $120 per square metre depending on the system and the substrate. Hourly rates for plastering labour in Sydney commonly fall between $55 and $95 per hour. All of those rates assume reasonably straightforward residential work on an accessible site.

Small work is priced per item instead, and a small patch or hole repair usually lands between $180 and $420. That looks expensive against an hourly rate until you add up travel, materials, equipment and the two or three separate visits needed for the coats to dry. Minimum charges exist for the same reason, and many plasterers will quote a half day minimum regardless of how little wall is actually involved. The practical response is to save up small jobs and have them all done together, which spreads those fixed costs across more work. A single room, walls and ceiling sheeted, set and finished, generally falls in the low thousands, and a three bedroom whole house re-sheet commonly runs $9,000 to $22,000.

Several loadings sit on top of those base rates, and they reflect real cost rather than padding. Ceilings above about three metres, stairwell voids and raked ceilings need scaffold or trestles and slow everything down, which appears on a quote as a height loading. Difficult access, a third floor walk up, a narrow terrace hallway or a site with no parking adds labour to the simple business of moving material, and working in an occupied house carries a further loading for masking, daily clean down, dust extraction and the lost productivity of working around furniture. Ask for the quote to separate materials, labour, preparation and rubbish removal, because that breakdown is what lets you compare two prices meaningfully.

Six Questions That Make Three Sydney Quotes Comparable

Three plastering quotes on the same room routinely arrive hundreds of dollars apart, and the gap is almost never the hourly rate. It is what each quote has assumed about the material behind the paint, the level of finish, who carries the waste away and whether the ceiling needs access equipment. Six questions put to all three settles most of that difference. The material question does the most work of the six on any Sydney house of a certain age.

A quote that has not established whether the existing sheeting is asbestos cement has priced an assumption, and it is the assumption that moves the number furthest. The second heaviest is the level of finish, because that is where two honest plasterers can price the same room differently without either being wrong. Send the same six in one email and the replies become comparable in a way that three site visits never quite are. The New South Wales plastering cost guide sets out the ranges those answers should land inside.

What to Look Out For on a Sydney Plastering Quote

A plastering quote is easy to compare on price and hard to compare on substance, which is where most disappointment originates. The first thing to check is whether the quote states a finish level and describes in plain terms what that level means. The second is whether it says how many coats the joins will receive and whether the surface will be fully skimmed or only jointed. A square metre rate with no mention of preparation is a frequent gap, because stripping wallpaper, removing old adhesive, correcting a bowed frame and filling existing damage all take hours that somebody has to pay for.

If two quotes differ by thousands of dollars, the difference usually sits in those unstated items and not in the hourly rate. Dust control is the next omission to look for, and a quote for an occupied house should say how the area will be sealed, what the floors will be covered with, whether dust extraction sanding is included and who cleans up at the end. A patch quoted over the phone or from a photograph, with no attempt to ask what caused the crack in the first place, is a warning on its own. Anybody willing to fill a diagonal crack in a brick wall without asking about drainage, trees or recent movement is selling a repair that will fail.

Pressure to pay cash, reluctance to put the quote in writing, a business name with no ABN and a request for a large deposit before any material arrives all point the same direction. Watch also for pricing that quietly assumes conditions you cannot deliver on the day. A rate calculated for an empty room will not hold when the furniture stays, the family is living there and the plasterer loses an hour each day masking and cleaning, and that gap tends to surface as a variation halfway through. Be equally wary of a quote that assumes the electrician has already disconnected the ceiling fittings, or that the old cornice will come off cleanly, when nobody has actually checked either. The useful questions are short ones: what finish, how many coats, what preparation is included, how is dust handled, and what happens if site conditions differ from the assumptions. A quote that answers those questions in writing is worth more than one that is two hundred dollars cheaper.

Sydney Housing, Suburb by Suburb

Travel is a real input on a small plastering job and most plasterers work a defined part of the basin, and what changes between areas is the housing stock, which decides whether a job is a straightforward re sheet or a removal followed by a re sheet. The inner suburbs bring terraces and semis through Paddington, Glebe, Newtown, Marrickville and Annandale, where lath and plaster, lime render and later fibrous cement patches often sit in the same wall. Access is tight, there is rarely anywhere to stage materials, and the cost sits in getting to the work as much as in doing it, while the middle ring through Ryde, Chatswood, Hurstville and Haberfield brings interwar and postwar brick with plasterboard ceilings and fibrous cement in wet areas. The western and south western corridors through Blacktown, Penrith, Liverpool, Bankstown, Fairfield and Campbelltown carry a large stock of fibro and brick veneer where sheeting is the default assumption until tested. Newer estates out through Castle Hill and the north west were built with modern board throughout, so the work there is additions and finish instead of removal. A Sydney builder is usually the one coordinating the sequence where plastering sits inside a larger renovation.