Drywall vs. Plaster: Which Is Better for Your Calgary Home?

Walk into any Calgary home built after 1960, and you’re almost certainly looking at drywall. Walk into a character home in Inglewood, Mount Royal, or Elbow Park built before that, and it might be plaster. The question — drywall vs. plaster — comes up whenever someone’s renovating an older home or just wondering if there’s something better than the standard 1/2″ gypsum board on their walls.

Short answer: for 95% of Calgary homeowners, drywall is the right call. But plaster has its place, and understanding the difference matters if you’re dealing with an older home or chasing a specific look.

What’s Actually Different Between Them

Drywall (also called gypsum board or Sheetrock — that’s technically a brand name, like Kleenex) is a panel made of gypsum plaster pressed between two sheets of paper. It comes in 4×8 or 4×12 sheets, gets screwed to studs, then taped and mudded at the seams. The whole process for a room takes a day or two.

Traditional plaster is a completely different animal. A plasterer applies multiple coats of wet plaster over wood lath strips (thin wooden slats nailed to the studs with gaps between them). The plaster squeezes through the gaps and forms “keys” that lock it to the wall. Three coats — scratch coat, brown coat, finish coat — each needing drying time. A single room can take a week.

That process is why plaster is largely extinct in new construction. It takes 3–5x longer than drywall and requires specialized skills that fewer tradespeople have.

Why Calgary Homes Almost Always Use Drywall

There are practical reasons drywall dominates here, beyond just cost.

Calgary’s temperature swings are brutal on plaster. We go from -30°C in January to +30°C in July. Chinooks can swing temperatures 20 degrees in a few hours. Plaster is rigid — it doesn’t flex. Those temperature cycles cause expansion and contraction in the framing, and plaster responds by cracking. Hairline cracks in plaster walls are practically universal in older Calgary homes. Drywall handles the movement better because it has some give at the taped joints.

Alberta’s dry climate is tough on plaster application. Plaster needs humidity to cure properly. Calgary’s average humidity is around 45–55% — much lower than cities in Ontario or BC where plaster was more common. Applying plaster in a Calgary winter with 20% indoor humidity is asking for problems.

Cost isn’t even close. Drywall installation runs $4–$7 per square foot in Calgary, including taping and finishing. Plaster work — if you can find someone to do it — runs $10–$25 per square foot. For a typical Calgary home with 2,000 sq ft of wall space, that’s the difference between $8,000–$14,000 and $20,000–$50,000.

Repairs are straightforward. Punch a hole in drywall? A patch, some mesh tape, three coats of mud, sand it smooth, and you’d never know. Plaster repair requires matching the original texture and composition, and the patch often cracks where it meets the original surface. We do drywall repairs regularly — most are done in a single visit.

When Plaster Actually Makes Sense

That said, plaster isn’t obsolete everywhere. There are situations where it’s worth considering:

Heritage home restoration. If you’re restoring a 1910 Ramsay home or a Mount Royal estate and want to maintain period authenticity, plaster is the historically accurate choice. Calgary’s heritage guidelines don’t require it, but serious restorations use it. There are maybe two or three plasterers in the Calgary area who still do this work.

Curved walls and archways. Plaster handles complex curves beautifully. Drywall can be bent (wet-bent or using flexible drywall), but it’s never as smooth on tight curves as a skilled plaster application. Custom archways in high-end homes sometimes use plaster for this reason.

Soundproofing. Plaster walls are denser than drywall — roughly 2–3x heavier per square foot. That mass blocks more sound. If you’re building a home studio or really need sound isolation between rooms, plaster (or double-layer drywall with Green Glue compound) outperforms a single layer of standard drywall.

For most Calgary homeowners? Drywall. It’s faster, cheaper, easier to repair, and performs better in our climate. If you’re renovating an older home that has plaster, the usual approach is to leave existing plaster in good condition and use drywall for any new walls or areas where the plaster is beyond repair.