Puerto Rico
Hi mate
I’m actually an Aussie living in Puerto Rico and I’ve been getting into construction here and learning plastering. I found your page and its been one of the best resources and insanely helpful so thank you for creating. I got some questions as I’m currently building a house myself, I do concrete plastering etc.
1. I am looking to do a white cement shower and the only two sands we can easily get here is river sand which or crushed limestone stand (which is white-pink) that’s used in plastering here. I’m trying to come up with a mix formula and a way to do it as I’ve never done a shower but
1. It’s block wall I’ll treat with a water proof agent like Redguard then bonding agent
2. Scratch coat using regular sand 1:3 ratio and with polymer
3. Next coat with limestone sand, + polymer and fibres 1:4 ratio
4. Final coat with polymer, cement, sand + dash of lime (if I can get it here) 1:5 ratio
2. I am insanely curious about your stucco floor as that’s exactly what I’m wanting to do and lower costs
3. Coloring, just to be clear are you using the actual paint diluted with acrylic to color your mixes or are you buying the actually Pigments themselves from the paint stores?
Any advice you can provide would be greatly appreciated, It is so hard to find knowledge on this stuff especially making your own recipes, basically everyone seems to want to sell an expensive product and being here at the ass end of the US territory in Puerto Rico getting specialty items here is expensive and not straightforward.
Greetings to the island of enchantment.
I need to straighten you out on not putting way too much sand in the mix.
You probably want to use the river sand for the scratch and brown and the limestone sand for the finish.
1. I say put it on the block with no sealer and no bonding agent.
There is no better bond than mortar on block and a bonding agent would only weaken the bond.
Some bonding agents fail when they get wet.
Here is a shower we did in 2005:
https://www.rtbullard.com/stucco/progress/shower.htm
We put the scratch coat right on the brick.
The floor underneath is concrete. The floor was painted with a rubber membrane and the walls were painted up about 6 inches.
We covered the membrane with metal lath.
We use an acrylic admixture which is equivalent to the polymer.
You don't need to use this in your scratch coat for bonding, but it will make the shower less porous.
1:3 is way too much sand. Our formula is one 94 lb. bag of Portland, one fourth of a 50 lb bag of lime, and 20 shovels of sand. 20 shovels is 4 bucketfuls, or about 1 cubic foot per bucket.
Water will go through overly sanded mortar more than a regular mix.
You can get by without polymer for your brown coat, but you definitely want it in your finish. Doing this will improve the bond, retain color in the mix, and make the finish less permeable. We use acrylic bonding admixture half and half with water. You can mix your paint color in the acrylic mix.
We use the same formula for our finish, one bag white PThis is 20 shovels or four buckets sand.ortland, on fourth bag of lime, and 200 lb.s white sand.
This is 20 shovels or four buckets sand per bag. Sand in 50 lb. or 100 lb. bags is a great labor saver.
Stucco floors are cool and aren't really difficult to do. Material wise they are cheap, but look elegant. The most important tip from me is if you have a rubber membrane under the floor, don't nail to the floor. In fact, you don't need to nail lath to a floor at all, the force of gravity will hold it in place. It is a good idea to tie the laps with tie wire. This keeps the lath from separating until the scratch coat sets up.
I noticed you have concrete floors. We did a concrete floor with a thin basecoat and a finish. We just used acrylic bonding admixture in the basecoat as well as the finish.
We use paint colorant, called paint tint at the paint store. Sherwin Williams colors work the best.
I have found Benjamin Moore colors come out way too yellow.
You need to find a paint store that will sell you the color. The Sherwin Williams store near me lets me have the tint for 50 cents per ounce, and I pay for the cans.
Here is the article I wrote about how to mix color:
https://www.stucconews.net/Stucco_and_plaster_questions/question7301.html
The most important thing I can say about a shower floor is to make sure the finished drain is lower than the finish coat for drainage, and to sculpture the floor from the outside down to the drain.
For example, this shower we did in West Virginia:
https://www.rtbullard.com/prog/Stucco_shower_in_Great_Cacapon,West_Virginia.html
Check out my article about stucco floors: