July 14, 2026 · 4 min read
Are plaster finishes worth it in a rental?
We get asked this often in Boise, where a lot of Bench and near-campus housing is rented or partly rented. The answer depends heavily on which room and which finish.
Where it pays back
Microcement in a rental bathroom is straightforwardly a good investment. It removes grout, which is the thing that looks bad fastest and generates the most turnover cleaning and repair.
A seamless bathroom also photographs extremely well, which matters if the unit is a short-term let competing on images.
Where it does not
Lime in a rental living room will show wear quickly, and tenants are not going to treat it the way an owner would. Unless you specifically want a lived-in patina, that money is better spent elsewhere.
Roman clay sits in between. Sealed, in a lower-traffic room, it holds up reasonably. In a hallway it will not.
The turnover math
Repainting between tenancies is a recurring cost that never stops. A hard finish that does not need repainting changes that arithmetic over a long enough hold, particularly in wet rooms where paint fails fastest.
In short
Microcement in the wet rooms, conventional paint everywhere else, is usually the rational allocation for a rental.
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