When you look at professionally fitted plaster coving, you can not see any of the joints or the mitres, any of the screw holes from where the coving has been fixed, you always need to mechanically fix plaster coving as well as using Plaster coving adhesive.
It is a common misconception amongst people who are not working with plaster cornice or coving on a regular basis, that it is going to look exactly like the plaster coving in the finished room when they open the pack, and in some cases people even think they have not got the same thing.
There are several things to remember, you always have to cut the ends off lengths of plaster coving, the ends of the coving are not damaged, they are never intended to be a finished joint, and each length of plaster coving is longer than the 2.4 meter (8 foot) length we quote on the website, this is to allow then ends of the pieces of plaster coving to be cut off to make a clean joint, after the ends are cut your length of plaster coving will still measure more than the 2.4M.
When fitting plaster coving we spend about one third of our time fixing the coving in position and then the other two thirds of the time filling the coving, it is not just the joints and the miters that need filling, but also along the top and bottom the amount of filling will vary depending on the how far the ceilings are out of true.
When plaster coving is first fixed in position it can look a mess, the mitres will be open there will be screw holes and there will be gaps along the top and the bottom, all of this is normal and once the plaster cornice has been filled it will be hard to see where the joints are and impossible to tell once it has been decorated.
There is always an amount of skill to achieve the perfect finish with plaster coving and there are a number of steps to go through in this process, only at the end when the plaster coving has been filled and then decorated will you see the final product.
Here are some pictures of LPC 020 a Victorian plaster cornice with modillion blocks being used in a narrow hallway as it typically would, you can see how uneven the walls are and the filling that has been necessary to achieve a straight line for the plaster cornice, is shown clearly as the bottom of the plaster cornice is picked out in gold.
