Dry lining and drywall installation

Frequently asked questions

What is dot and dab, and why does it matter for fixing things to the wall?

It is board stuck to masonry on blobs of adhesive rather than screwed to a frame, and it leaves a void of perhaps ten to twenty millimetres between the board and the wall. That void is the reason ordinary plasterboard fixings fail on it: a plug expanding behind the board has nothing to expand into, and a hollow-wall anchor designed for a stud partition assumes a void of a particular depth with nothing behind it. Hanging anything of weight on a dot-and-dab wall means either finding a dab, which is guesswork, or using a long fixing that passes through the board and the void and anchors into the masonry beyond. That is also why a dot-and-dab wall sounds hollow when tapped and a visitor concludes it is a stud wall, which changes everything they would plan to do to it.

Skim or tape and joint — what is the difference in the finish?

Two completely different ways of arriving at a paintable wall. British practice usually SKIMS: a thin coat of finish plaster applied over the whole board, giving a continuous seamless surface with no distinction between the board and the joint, which is why British walls are usually painted without any board texture showing. American practice TAPES AND JOINTS: only the joints and the fastener heads are covered, feathered out with compound and sanded, leaving the board's own paper face as the finish across most of the wall. Each has its logic — skimming is faster to a high finish over small areas, taping is far less material over large ones — and each produces a different substrate. Paint behaves differently on the two, and so does any repair.

What do the Levels of finish mean, and is there a British equivalent?

The American system grades how far the taping and finishing has been taken, from Level 0 — board hung, nothing done — through Level 3 for a wall receiving a heavy texture, Level 4 as the normal painted finish, to Level 5, a skim coat over the entire surface for critical lighting or gloss paint. It is a contractual specification: the level is stated, priced and inspected. British practice has no directly equivalent ladder, because skimming produces something close to Level 5 as standard, and the specification tends to describe the plaster system rather than a grade of finish. When reading across markets that is worth knowing in both directions: an American Level 4 wall under a raking light will show joints a British client would consider a defect, and specifying a British skim to an American contractor is asking for their most expensive option.