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Been a couple of weeks now since I went to World of Concrete in Las Vegas. I’d like to share with you a few things I found to be kind of interesting down there.
SPIDERLATH: This is a simple but kind of ingenious alternative to metal lath for exterior scratch and brown. Have never used it nor do I know anyone who has, but my friend Bill with Elite Plastering thought it looked promising.
Here’s a link to the Spiderlath site.
JIFFY MIXER: This is a fairly well distributed brand of mixing paddle for plaster and stucco. Don’t know why it never came across my radar before. Most paddles don’t work for Venetian Plaster because they scratch the insides of our buckets, and once you get off the phone with an installer that has little pieces of plastic in his/her Marmorino Classic, you make sure it doesn’t happen again. The paddles from Jiffy Mixer have a rounded bottom which helps keep the paddle from cutting up your buckets. It mixes really quickly also. We are thinking of distributing these since they work so well for us.
Here’s a link to the Jiffy Mixer Site.
I thought I had found a really great penetrating sealer as well, which initially made me very happy. Finding a good penetrating sealer for lime plasters can be a little challenging. Unfortunately this sealer mattes out our finishes, so it would only work for something like an exterior Intonachino application. I was hoping we might be able to use it as an alternative for sealing Tadelakt showers and the like. Oh well…
Those were the standouts for me, aside from the decorative cements I saw. I’ll get to that next post.…
Congratulations to our good friend Lars Hansen and his wife Cheryl. They’ve recently opened a beautiful little store in Durango, CO focused on natural building materials.
Lars hails from Denmark. I just loved that place when I went years ago – everyone riding bicycles around Copenhagen – very civilized. Lars has been running a clay and lime plastering installation business for many years and this place is a natural extension of his contracting work.
From the Durango Herald:
“We want consumers to know that all-natural finishes aren’t exclusively for adobe or straw-bale houses,” Hansen said. “They’re available for any house.”
The full article is here.
We are very pleased that Lars and Cheryl have chosen Stucco Italiano to represent lime plasters in their store. Best of luck to you!
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Had a good time at World of Concrete last week. Met up with my friend Bill Kaiser, owner of Elite Plastering in Bend, OR, which was a great way to get a real exterior stucco guys’ view of what looked interesting.
Word is that attendance was down and so was total booth space rented. Not surprising considering the economy and the construction industry. It’s a big financial commitment to rent a booth, especially for a small business. That can eat up a large portion of your yearly marketing business so you really have to make it work if you do a show like that. It’s still a massive show with tons to see. Even though it is a national show it seems by far the greatest density of people are from the west coast and surrounding southwest states. That is merely a subjective observation; don’t have data to back that up.
There was a lot of decorative cement represented down there. Way more than even 2 or 3 years ago, at least that’s what it seemed like to me. A friend of mine in the biz said the technology is getting so good so fast it’s becoming a matter of finding really good people to do business with as much as anything else. The technologies for the cements, the binders, the epoxies, the stains, etc., are all relatively similar. Very good and just getting better. But when you look around at the booths and the samples, you see a very wide variety in quality if you are looking from an aesthetic point of view. Different niches being filled, I suppose.
I was saying to Bill that if you want to get into decorative cement as a high-end artisan you need to find the companies that are creating great looking stuff. And you also need to find the companies that are attached to other artisans or other studios that are also doing beautiful work. That kind of work seems to feed back and forth from manufacturer to artisan and back so that a high standard is established and maintained. As well, especially important for the decorative cement business I think, is finding a manufacturer who will support you technically, because cement can end up being quite a bit more technical than painted finishes or plaster finishes. Also find an honest, straightforward manufacturer. We made a terrible decision a few years back bringing in a line from a manufacturer owned by a really shady person – we just had to get out of decorative cement completely for a while after that experience.
Cement finishes are kind of the third spoke of the decorative artisan’s wheel of products they need to be familiar with. There are also painted/acrylic finishes and natural plasters. The fully equipped decorative artisan should be fluent in all three, I believe. We are very happy to have found a great cement manufacturer with great artisans using their product, and we will be bringing in a full line of floor, counter top, and vertical cement finishes to our studio next month.
I’ll talk about this a little in my next post in a couple of days – also more photos and I’ll share some interesting products with you I found while walking the show.
Aaron…
Stucco Italiano is a member of the US Green Building Council. Naturally high in pH, lime finishes act as an anti-bacterial surface, neutralizing the development of organic substances such as mold and fungus.
Non-toxic and green, our lime plasters are ideal for interiors or exteriors. A breathable system, our lime plasters allow water vapor to permeate freely so moisture evaporates quickly, unlike acrylic finishes which can trap moisture inside the wall.
