BIG ISLAND, Va. (AP) - Plaster repair work may be a dwindling trade, but the challenging projects are a good fit for Manuel DeLuna as a man who loves working with his hands.
The congregation at Hunting Creek Baptist Church in Big Island recently called in DeLuna’s services to help repair the plaster on the sanctuary’s walls and ceiling.
Built around 1951, the sanctuary has developed cracks and chipped-off sections of plaster since the ’70s and has exposed the brick below, according to Gary Oliver, chairman of the church’s building and grounds committee.
Photos taken before DeLuna’s repairs show large patches needing repair in an entryway outside of the sanctuary and, inside, cracks trailing up the wall and crossing the tall ceiling.
“You have a tendency to put something like that on the backburner,” Oliver said. “. It finally comes to a point where (you say), ’Hey, are we going to keep this on the backburner, let it keep deteriorating, or are we going to fix it?’”
The plaster repair ended up snowballing into a group of projects for the church: polishing up and lowering the hanging lights, polishing the wooden floors and cleaning up the pews.
Church services were held in a hall below the sanctuary - squeezing in about 100 members of the congregation - while the work went on.
But finding someone to fix the plaster in the first place was a process in itself. Workers experienced with the material can be hard to find.
“I guess there’s not really a lot of plaster jobs. Everybody’s putting drywall overtop of it,” DeLuna said. “They are around; I think Roanoke has more plaster than the Lynchburg area. I think some of the gentlemen that do it now are a little bit older just because, back in the day, that’s mostly what they all did.”
Delbert Hensley, who was born and raised in the church, said he sold DeLuna plaster and drywall materials out of his Roanoke business around eight to 10 years ago. He recommended DeLuna after noting the quality of work he’s done, having kept in touch with him over the years.
At 41, DeLuna is one of the younger plaster workers Hensley knows of.
“You can’t get a young guy who’s just been getting into the trade because it takes years and experience,” Hensley said.
Though there are a few trade schools that train people to work with plaster, DeLuna said he learned through an apprenticeship with a 70-year-old man named Frankie starting around 1999, helping him work on historical buildings around Charlottesville. DeLuna said Frankie had three others working under him before DeLuna came along.
“I was his helper, but I could watch him do it and all his techniques and that’s how I learned,” he said. “I helped him off and on for about 6 years and after that, I was a little scared to do it but I took it sort of upon myself.”
Working under Frankie, he said, he did a lot of clean-up work and moved into small patch jobs he’d do himself.
When he was young, DeLuna said his family followed migrant work from Florida up to Nelson County, going from picking oranges to apples further north. At one orchard, he said he had to re-straighten the nails pulled from wooden boxes so they could be re-used.
“It taught me a lot because in our trade, a lot of our construction partners . just throw everything away,” he said. “I guess that’s one of the reasons we’ve been kind of successful is that we’re conscious about the materials.”
Year-round work kept his family in Nelson, and DeLuna said he wanted to finish all four years of high school in one place. There, he said, he dipped his toes into construction work through a weekend job with his neighbor.
He said he took off from there, working with Frankie and following in his family’s footsteps.
“My father was a mason and . you kind of want to live to those expectations,” he said. “. I guess it was instilled in me from very little just to work hard, period.”
DeLuna said he now has two apprentices of his own.
Since plaster started phasing out in the ’70s, he said 90 percent of his work is in repairs. If home or building owners aren’t looking to fix the plaster, he said, workers will place drywall in front of it or chip the plaster away.
Branching off on his own, DeLuna has continued work on historical buildings - which is par for the course when repairing plaster. He said he completely restored the historic Monticola house in Howardsville, a project that took about seven months to complete around 2004. He said he worked off pictures of the historic house.
The Hunting Creek repair work was more typical, taking DeLuna about six weeks to complete.
Starting his work on the sanctuary in late January, he said he was worried about the temperature differences outside of the walls and ceiling. Despite the rough winds the church can sometimes experience, DeLuna said he was lucky for this project.
“The setting times (of) plaster . are very difficult,” he said. “Sometimes it dries too fast and you have to restart over. Humidity has to be just right, and it’s got to be a certain temperature. And no air flow whatsoever. None of it’s easy.”
DeLuna cut into small cracks in the sanctuary to create tooth in the cracks, where he could apply a bonding agent, then a strong base coat.
His work is reinforced with a fiberglass mesh - the modern alternative to using horsehair in the plaster mix. At the end, he puts on a veneer finish.
Most of his clients opt for a smooth finish, but DeLuna said some have requested different finishes that match other parts of their houses.
Though the cracks at Hunting Creek didn’t pose any kind of structural or safety hazard, Oliver said he’s known of a plaster ceiling at another local church that broke off and fell to the ground. With all the repair and cleaning work on the sanctuary now completed, he said it looks good as new.
“Quality work with quality people is few and far between,” he said.
While the walls and ceiling at the Hunting Creek Baptist Church sanctuary look clean and unblemished now that DeLuna’s finished his work, he said those hairline cracks are simply the nature of the beast.
“Plaster in itself, there’s always going to be cracks - that’s just the nature of the material,” he said. “If the building is structurally sound, it should be good for a long time, but will those cracks come back? Probably, yes.”
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Information from: The News & Advance, https://www.newsadvance.com/
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