Stud walls and partitions, false ceilings, patching after electrics or plumbing, and skimming a wall back to something you can paint. Describe the room and send a photo, and you get a free quote with the preparation, the boarding and the finish priced separately.
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Drywall and plastering work in the Algarve covers plasterboard partitions and false ceilings, known locally as pladur and tetos falsos, patching and making good after other trades, and the cement or gypsum finishing of masonry walls. Board is fast and clean; masonry render is what an older Portuguese house is usually made of. Handyman Algarve quotes drywall and plastering in the Algarve for free, in English or Portuguese.
Almost every Portuguese house is built of brick or block with a cement render, and 60.4 per cent of Algarve buildings were built before 1991. That is what is behind your paint. Plasterboard arrives on top of that, and the two work together rather than competing: masonry for structure and for anything wet, board for speed, for hiding services, and for shapes that would be slow to build in brick. Where people get caught out is fixing to board later, because a television bracket or a wall unit needs a stud, a noggin, or the right cavity fixing, and the time to say where those go is before the board is closed up, not after.
Since 1 January 2024 the Simplex Urbanístico reform has made interior alteration works exempt from prior control, provided they improve, do not harm, or do not affect the stability structure, do not change the height of the building, the shape of the facade or the shape of the roof, and do not remove azulejos from the facade. A partition, a false ceiling and a skim normally sit comfortably inside that. The exemption never applies to classified buildings or their protection zones, and a município may add its own step: Silves, for example, asks to be notified at least five days before exempt works begin. If a wall might be structural, that is not a judgement call to make from a photograph, and the answer is a technician on site.
Board work is quoted by the square metre of finished surface, as of 2026, and what moves the rate is everything around the boarding rather than the board itself. A straight partition in an empty room is the cheap case. The same area of ceiling is dearer, because it is worked overhead. Curves, bulkheads, recesses for lighting and openings for doors each add cutting and framing. So does working around furniture in a house someone is living in, and so does the finish level, because a wall that will be painted in matt colour is a different standard from one that will be lit by a downlight two centimetres from its face. Preparation of an old masonry wall is its own item, since nobody can see what is under the existing paint until a corner is opened up.
Room dimensions and a photo of each wall are enough for a first quote. See how it works for what happens between the request and the finished job.
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Plastering is the finishing of a wall or ceiling in a wet material that is applied, levelled and left smooth. In Portugal it usually means one of two things: reboco, a sand and cement render that goes onto masonry and takes the wall flat, or a gypsum skim over plasterboard. They are different trades in practice, and the same wall may need both, because the render makes the surface true and the skim makes it paintable.
A small patch, yes, and it is a good first job: filling a chased channel or a hole from an old fixing is forgiving because the paint hides the last of it. A whole wall is harder than it looks, not because the material is difficult but because keeping a wet surface flat across two metres is a skill that comes from repetition. The honest test is whether the wall will be lit from the side, because low angled light shows every ripple.
For a homeowner here the useful split is gypsum based and cement based. Gypsum plaster and plasterboard are for dry interior surfaces: fast, smooth, easy to paint, and unhappy anywhere water reaches them. Cement and lime renders are for exteriors, bathrooms and anything against masonry that may carry moisture. Choosing the wrong one is the reason plaster crumbles in a shower room or behind a kitchen sink.
Prepare first: cut out anything loose, treat the background, and fix the beads and the corner profiles that give straight edges. Then apply and rule off in coats, letting each set before the next. Then finish, either by trowelling the top coat smooth or by skimming over board. Then leave it alone. Painting fresh plaster too early traps moisture and the paint peels, which in a wet winter month is weeks rather than days.
Standard board is not, and moisture resistant board is, within limits. The green faced boards resist humidity and splash but are not waterproof, so a shower area still needs a tanking layer or a suitable backer board behind the tiles. In a Portuguese house the drier question is usually ventilation: a bathroom with no working extractor turns the whole room into the wet zone, and no board on the market fixes that.
Three practical things, and the appearance is the fourth. It hides pipework, ducting and cabling that would otherwise be chased into concrete. It carries recessed lighting, which is why most are built. It gives somewhere to put insulation or acoustic material in a flat with a neighbour above. And it lowers the volume of a high room, which makes it easier to heat and cool.