Painting a bad wall surface

MaggieBaking

My husband has the week off work and we decided last minute to decorate the bedroom. I've pulled 2 test sections of the wall paper off and it's leading me to think that 2 walls wont be too bad, and the other 2 are going to be in an awful condition.

On the bad walls - the plaster skim appears to be paper thin and tiny sections of it are crumbling off, and the wallpaper pattern appears to have imprinted heavily on the walls below.

I really can't be stressed with getting the room re plastered and I didn't want to put wallpaper up. Have we any hope at getting it painted ourselves? I'm going to put a picture up later today to see what you think but I'm just Googling it now

phill99

If the wall is as bad as you say, it will be pointless and a waste of money to paint it. You need to get it replastered which will save you money in the long run. You could try putting up a heavy grade lining paper, but this may not be the ideal solution.

MaggieBaking

Quite happy to waste money on a fix we can live with for a year or so. It's not the cost of the plastering that's a problem, it's the time involved to do it

Procrastinator333

You could have a go at plasetring it yourself. Get a few tubs of ready mixed plaster and have a go. It isn't going to look great or anything like a professional job, but it will likely be better than what is there at the moment.

But if it is really bad then I would have thought your only 2 options are 1) get it plastered or 2) use some heavy duty wall paper or lining paper to try and hide it.

phill99

MaggieBaking wrote: »

Quite happy to waste money on a fix we can live with for a year or so. It's not the cost of the plastering that's a problem, it's the time involved to do it

But it will only take a day.

May well pay dividends.

Leif

You might not have to have it replastered, depending on the damage. Here is the hallway of my house:


The white patches on the far wall are filler. There was a significant gap between old and new plaster due to supposed damp proofing. It required repairing. Here is the third bedroom:



The wall with the window was in a dreadful state, with a large crack top right, and a horrible join between old and new plaster beneath the window. Now that it is painted you would not know it was atrocious, which is why the previous owner had wall papered the house.

Wash the walls to remove wall paper paste, then get some powder filler such as Easi-fill or Tetrion, apply with a metal scraper, try and get it flush, then sand level. Once filled, apply a sealer such as Zinsser Gardz (binds powdery plaster and seals in paste), then paint. You have to be very careful to fill all cracks and marks. Shine a bright light on the wall at an angle to see marks, then use a pencil to circle the mark, and fill later. A professional would never do this because it takes so much time, and for them it is cheaper to skim. But you can get excellent results this way, but it takes work.

Treadway1

The walls in my house were in an awful state and were crumbling beyond belief when I stripped them back but luckily my Dad had been a painter and decorator 'man and boy'! Here's what we (he) did.

Sand the walls down to get rid of any remaining paint or detritus that was under the existing wall paper, then paint a half and half mix of PVA glue and water on to the walls. Fill in any cracks or missing plaster with polyfilla and rub all the walls down (including the new polyfilla) when dry.

Then go over the walls again with the PVA/water mix one more time and rub down again but very gently this time. That should seal the plaster back enough so that it doesn't soak up to much over the wallpaper paste.

FInally we papered over with a 1700 grade lining paper (it was like cardboard) which adequately covered over all the minor imperfections left over. I should say that papering with lining paper that thick was no mean feat and even with his 40 odd years experience, my dad struggled to line each piece up with the last. Although this was probably more to do with the walls 'bellying' so much!

It took a good few days to do all of this but now the walls look great painted. I should mentioned that my walls had the old horse hair plaster so was very old and dry before we took the above steps but I've since had no issue with the wallpaper coming loose or peeling.

HTH