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Where do you purchase blue board? I live in NJ and have tried the local building suppliers and both Home Depot and Lowes but with no success. Any advice on how to locate the veneer plaster board?

BTW I love how you did that Ornamental plaster ring. Very cool jig you set up.

You can order blueboard (veneer plaster base) from a regular building supply that sells drywall materials, but not a place like Lowe's or Home Depot. When we were working in Pittsburgh, I was surprised to see blueboard, veneer plaster basecoat, and any plaster material you want at Home Depot. Apparently, they do a lot of plaster still in Pittsburgh, but we were there to do pebble dash stucco, where they have a scarcity or complete absence of plasterers to do.

Blueboard can be ordered in 30 sheet hacks. Usually, it takes 3 days to arrive. Here in the Washington area, blueboard is shipped from Danville, Virginia. Blueboard and veneer plaster is popular in Virginia Beach, and the Tidewater area of Virginia.

A Google search showed me you have L&W Supply and Kamco in New Jersey. I have ordered blueboard and plaster materials from both of them. The L&W supply in Norfolk, Virginia stocks plaster.

The price for blueboard is usually the same as sheetrock, that is gypsum wallboard used for drywall construction.

Now, you may be wondering, what if you need less than 30 sheets, or you need 31 sheets. If the board is sold 30 sheets at a time, how can you avoid throwing away $ 700 worth and 3000 pounds of materials ?

You can always paint regular sheetrock with plaster weld, and it works fine. Larsen's plaster weld and USG plaster bonder are both available from Amazon. One gallon should easily cover 200 square feet, or four sheets. You can even buy plaster weld by the quart. My favorite brand for years and years was Euco Weld. The new generation of Euco weld stinks to high heaven, so I don't use it anymore.

I have to tell another of my stories. About 40 years ago, I had a job plastering a big kitchen in Warrenton, Virginia. The owners were from Italy and hated drywall. Blueboard was in stock in Beltsville, Maryland about 50 miles away, so I drove my stake body truck up and bought 30 sheets, 1/2", 4 feet by 12 feet, which stuck out 3 feet from the end of my truck. I didn't think to put 2 by fours under the board to support it.

On the way back from Beltsville I got stuck in a terrible traffic jam and got hit with a thunderstorm. The boards all got wet and ruined. Also, the boards broke off, seeing how they were 12 foot boards and my truck bed was 9 feet long. I drove straight to the Fauquier County landfill and threw all that blueboard away.

Meanwhile, I went to a regular building supply in Warrenton and got 30 sheets of regular drywall and put it up in the kitchen.

I didn't paint the boards with plaster weld, and I put on the veneer basecoat. The basecoat bonded so well I couldn't knock it off with a hatchet. The moral of the story is that veneer basecoat bonds fine to regular sheetrock. I can't recommend that to people because you are supposed to paint it with plaster weld. Putting veneer basecoat directly on the wallboard worked fine for me, and I put basecoat on thick on my ceilings. I am sure the plaster is still fine to this day.