Last year around this time, volunteers from the Corrales Historical Society helped prepare and apply new mud plaster to the historic Martinez house in Corrales. Little did they know they celebrated the annual event of applying mud to the Martinez House for the last time.  The owner of the Martinez House must have grown weary of the age old-tradition, and rare practice, of mud plaster after this past summer’s brutal storms, because on Saturday, the Martinez House got a new coat of cement plaster to join the ranks of the vast majority of adobe structures in New Mexico that are plastered and stuccoed.

The first photo shows the north side of the Martinez House with its new plaster, while the second photo shows a similar shot of the wall as it had been prepared for the new coat of mud plaster last year. The third photo shows the south and east side of the house with its new “brown” coat of plaster. The fourth photo, from last year, shows the south wall with the newly applied mud plaster and the east wall waiting for new mud. The last photo is a view of the freshly plastered east an north walls of the house.

After the “brown” coat of plaster dries completely, they should apply a color coat of stucco that I assume will be very close to the color of the mud they covered with cement plaster. The cement plaster and stucco will provide a much more durable and weatherproof covering than the mud plaster, but the old adobe blocks do not breath properly under cement plaster/stucco finishes, which is not good for the blocks. But the durability and protection of cement plaster has obviously become preferable to the cost and burden of applying mud plaster every year, a finish that offers little protection from severe storms like we had this past summer.