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No, $ 45 per square foot doesn't seem high seeing how they don't make wood lath anymore. Wood lath can be made on a table saw. We were just working next door to a remodeling job where they were tearing out wood lath and carrying it out in bundles and throwing it in a trash trailer. One can get old wood lath free if he keeps his eyes open. I have thrown away a lot of wood lath.

Still, wood lath never was worth a damn.

Here I am bundling up wood lath to throw away.

For historic work we use metal lath or rock lath or blue board. Since they don't make rock lath anymore, we use Sheetrock turned over backwards. What difference does it make if there is wood lath underneath or not? Why not put on a superior product ? Modern plaster is far better and new plaster on lath still has a plaster appearance. After all, you can't see the lath through the plaster.

One thing people don't understand about wood lath is the plaster basecoat isn't gypsum plaster but lime and sand.

It is rare that wood lath is re-used using gypsum plaster. My attempts at re-using wood lath have been a failure. There is a crack at every wood lath joint. United States Gypsum had instructions in their handbook years ago on how to plaster on wood lath. The lath needs to be wet down and water allowed to soak in several times. Then a scratch coat and brown coat applied with a heavy amount of sand in the plaster.

Using this method, a small patch job would take over a week. That little $ 45 would evaporate before the patch is finished.

Lime and sand basecoats can be identified easily because lime and sand produces weak, crumbly mortar that is reinforced with hair. Gypsum plaster, on the other hand, is super hard, like cement, and is used for high abuse walls.

Lime doesn't really set up like plaster, but hardens mainly by drying, sort of like drywall mud. The procedure would be to soak the wood lath two or three times until the lath is saturated. Then a scratch coat needs to be applied and allowed to set up possibly a week before the browncoat. Meanwhile the wall would need to be wet down and rubbed with a float every couple days to pack it down and rub out the shrinkage cracks. I don't know where to get hair for the mortar, except from a barber shop. They do make polypropylene fibers, which are used in mortar and concrete. The finish coat is lime and gauging plaster which is readily available. All this can be done if a plasterer lived next door or nearby. This may be doable if there was a whole house to do. For one wall the price would run into the thousands. Still, I doubt a whole house could be done with wood lath and a lime and sand basecoat for $ 45 per square foot.

The only building I have seen done in recent years, that is within the last 40 years or so, with wood lath and lime and sand is in Montpelier, that is James Madison's mansion in Orange County, Virginia. Typical of these ceilings is sagging and cracks about every 6 feet on center. A well known company from Richmond did the plastering. I turned down a historic job with wood lath and lime and sand.(The house belonged to a civil war hero from Virginia). I don't know how to estimate such a thing because I have very little experience using lime and sand, and I would never stand behind the work.