I was relaxing on the beach in Key Largo years ago, enjoying my vacation when my friend ran up to me and asked if I could help him out. He was working on this huge mansion by the cut and they were running out of time to finish.

Ten minutes later, I stood in this immense, brand-new home. The ocean breeze and sunlight that came through the wrapped glass windows were a wonderful blend of nature.

My friend handed me a flat trowel and some plaster and told me to fill all the screw holes. Little did I know that this job was the beginning of a trade that I would enjoy for twenty years.

After that job, I bought myself some trowels, a hawk (the flat tray with handle underneath to hold the plaster) and a pole sander. I loved the simplicity of it all. My mother sewed for me a custom made canvas bag to carry all my tools.

Working and learning with friends that installed the gyprock, I would happily tape and plaster all day. I began doing new houses, condos and hotels, then branched into doing renovations on old buildings.
I got very good at doing sharp corners after getting a contract for 25 skylights. They must be perfect angles because the sun works as a spot light.

There was one friend who hired me to do his shoe store, office and summer home.
We met when he was looking for someone to make 43 inset boxes on the wall in his shop. Each box had a small spotlight and a shoe would be displayed in each box. I renovated his office upstairs, then the addition to his cottage on the lake.

His addition was bigger than his original house and it was ten minutes from my cabin. Every morning I left my cabin and crossed the American border to Canada. After work, I would cross again.

A group of friends and I renovated a famous landmark hotel in New Hampshire. Each room was connected by a door from back in the day when the help would travel with the families. The job was to remove every door, close the hole with gyrock and my job was to plaster.

After working all day on the hotel, we slept at a quant little hotel. The owner of the hotel asked if I would finish the plastering at his house while I was there.

I would return to the hotel late afternoon, take a nap, then work on his house until eleven o'clock at night. I did that for a week and returned to Vermont exhausted.

Once I was at my cabin and a friend came to ask if I could finish a rush job in Montreal. The next day I was at the apartment and realized what these guys had done.

The owners of the duplex were an elderly Italian couple on a budget. They had hired my friends to do just some plumbing and painting. They had then replaced all the pipes, that was not planned. The bill was double what it should have been.

The daughter was getting married in a week and was to move in upstairs after the wedding.
I began by replacing the gyrock and plastering. Every day the mother would make me a delicious Italian lunch and she would always have a bag of home made cookies and cake for me to take home.

He cleaned at the train stations and she was a cleaner at the hospital. They had worked hard and saved money for the renovation. After a few days, I had finished the job and asked them who was going to paint the apartment.

The mother began to cry and the father explained in his broken English that they had no more money to pay for labor. They had bought the paint already, but no money left for labor.

I was heartsick sitting with these two wonderful, simple immigrants on their small porch teeming with tomato and fresh basil plants.

I promised them that I would paint the apartment as a wedding present to their daughter.
I had already been invited to the wedding, bless.

I called the friend that had brought me in and I told him that we were going to paint and make this apartment ready for next week, for free.

At Italian weddings, the MC calls the guests and they walk up with their gifts and put them on the table.
We walked up the aisle and took a bow.

If I ever need a home cooked Italian meal while In Montreal, I know where to go and I am welcomed like family.

Another bittersweet job was a hippie couple that asked me to fix their ceiling that was wavy and water damaged.
Their house was bohemiam decor with antiques and simple decorations. They did not have a lot of money, but this was the happiest, most peaceful house I had ever been in. We got to be friends during the week I worked there. I had noticed that their very small bathroom had peeling paint and crumbling grout between the antique tiles.

We went to the hardware store and bought some light blue grout for the tiles. First, I scaped the old paint and glazed the wall and ceiling with a thin coat of plaster.

As we waited for that to dry, we removed the old grout and applied the new. I then painted the bathroom which took about twenty minutes. Spending the afternoon doing this fun job with Fleetwood Mac in the background and a nice lunch was not like work for me.

In a couple hours, their bathroom was completely transformed. They gave me a pristine antique coca cola cooler filled with cold Heineken beer for my extra time. We are still friends years later.

My jobs was not all friendships and lunches.I did have a few bad experiences on the job. One job was at a retail store where they combined two stores into one, was a disaster from the first day. They had showed me the plans and we agreed on a price. When I arrived to begin plastering they told me they had changed a few things. There were more corners and angles in this new plan,  which made the job much harder.

On the last day of this job, I brought in a sullen friend that owed me money. The debt would be paid if he came to help me sand everywhere for the day. We were almost finished and I was happy to get out of this place. He wasn't concentrating on the scaffold and whacked the fire extinguisher on the ceiling. Water sprayed out everywhere.
Being a Sunday, there were hardly any people there and I remember running down the corridor looking for someone to turn the main water off. It was like a nightmare.

Another bad story was the store in Old Montreal where I had finished my work and left the welders there.They were cutting out old pipes with the  torch and started a fire on the old wood.I arrived back that night for the emploee party and saw that all my work had been torn down for the firemen to put out the fire.

I  truly did enjoy plastering for twentyyears and the different situations with each job. Fixing a water damaged ceiling once, I had to copy the old original moulding. The old time plasterers would throw the plaster perfectly into the corners, then run a template along, blending the plaster and creating beautiful moulding. When I learned of this old time method, I loved this trade even more.

I bought some tiny square dowels and a paint brush to apply plaster on the rounded parts. You could not tell the difference between the old and the new once it was painted.

I met so many wonderful people doing this job. Every day I learned something new. When I was working on the condos at the ski mountain, there was a group of Italian men working on the condo next door. Everyone would take their lunch break at one o'clock, but I would continue to work until two o'clock, then take my lunch into their unit and watch these experts plaster as I ate my lunch. I learned a little Italian too.

There are some funny memories too. My friend and I were talking on this one site as I watched this young man struggling to make a corner nice and straight. His trowel was too narrow, so I lent him my wider one and he learned the importance and satisfaction of using the right tools.

I still plaster, but not those huge jobs any more. I prefer to teach and work alongside people that want to learn ...and can move the scaffolding for me.