wood cladding removal

shaun99

Hi, my new property has timber cladding on the living room ceiling. I’ve toyed with the idea of painting it but it simply has to go!

So I’ve been googling ‘timber cladding removal’ etc and not getting anywhere. People tend to just paint it rather than deal with the hassle of removal but I’d prefer the original ceiling.

There is however plenty on the web about the various ways of installing it so I suppose I have to glean what I can from that and go from there. The main problem is that it’s so tightly fitted there is no way of getting it up easily to take a look to see how it’s been done.

The most predominant method seems to be the use of battens spaced across the ceiling and fixing the wood to these. The wood also usually seems to be tongue and groove. At the moment I can’t confirm whether or not this is the case for what’s been done on my ceiling. There is also a fake cornice supporting the wood which is hampering my ability to prise open any of the cladding.

How should I tackle this? Remove the cornice and see if I can get through one of the end bits of cladding? If it wasn’t for the fear of pulling the whole (proper) ceiling down I would just take a hammer to the thing and rip it down!

Any help would be much appreciated.

Ebe_Scrooge

Not sure how much help this will be, but ....

The cladding I've come across in old houses has been fixed in place with small nails / tacks. They are punched in to just below the surface, then the head is covered with a tiny blob of filler.

If you look very carefully, you may be able to spot the blobs of filler, try and gently prise a board up at that point and you should be able to lift the tack out a fraction, then grab it with some pincers and remove it.

If you manage this, then at least you should be able to remove a board or two to see what's going on, without doing any major damage, and take it from there.

On the other hand, the boards may have been put up with an adhesive like no-nails or similar. In this case, I think you're going to damage the underlying plaster / whatever if you just try and rip it down. I don't have any suggestions for that one, I'm afraid. Let's hope you're lucky and it's nailed there !

ormus

tongue and groove cladding is held by secret nailing. thats why you cannot see anything.
the tongues are nailed and the next piece (ie the grooves) covers the nails.

savemoney

I painted mine in living room it was heavily lacquered and I painted it with Zinseer bullseye 1-2-3 around £40 for a large tin) and them used normal (dulux) emulsion paint as it was easy than removing and also I would have a gap where the coving is

I didnt want to run the risk of new ceiling and also loosing nice coving I had, I was pretty pleased of the finish it lets the room far more lighter than dark lacquer

carefullycautious

Wow that ceiling looks lovely especially with the coving.