Lath and plaster

Lath and plaster is a building process used to finish mainly interior walls and ceilings in Canada and the United States until the late 1950s. After the 1950s, drywall began to replace the lath and plaster process in the United States.

In the United Kingdom and its colonies, lath and plaster was often used for interior partition walls and the construction of ceilings, before the introduction of plasterboard in the 1930s. In the U.K., riven or split hardwood laths were often used of random lengths and sizes. Splitting the timber, as opposed to sawing in straight lines, followed the grain of the timber which greatly improved strength and durability. Also, reed mat was used as a lath. The technique derives historically from the earlier, more primitive, wattle and daub.