Decorating nightmare

[Uhtred]

I've taken a few days off to decorate my daughter's bedroom and i'm out of my depth on day one! We bought this house last year and it's a 1970s build.

Anyway the room i'm talking about is painted but we know that it did have wall paper at one point. Looking closely at the paint you can see that it's very rough in places and even if I sand + paint on top I don't know if it would look respectable.

The most obvious problem is that the tape between the aertex celling and walls has failed and needs to be replaced or covered with coving.

Where there are holes or damage that need filling i'm finding that the paint is flaking off quite badly in places.

In other places where there are hairline cracks i've started to chase them out to fill but found paper strips underneath which are covering the seams between the boards.

At this point i've realised that this room has probably never been plastered and the old wall paper was removed (badly) from the boards and then painted on top and perhaps without properly sealing the boards, and so the paint hasn't adhered properly.

Does that sound likely? This is probably the same genius that stuck the fire alarms up with mastic

I'm thinking:

• continue to remove flaking paint
• remove failed paper around the ceiling
• wash down
• patch up holes etc with filler
• phone a plasterer (not going to be easy to find one at the moment)
• paint
• get coving fitted

Any advice would be most welcome

Some epics

 

[Uhtred]

Looks like a ocuk special painted in a weekend can’t understand why it would take a week are you mad my mate can do it for £80 I paid £40 etc

Don't, the wife wanted me to two bedrooms and put some shelves up, at this rate it will just be the shelves

 

[Uhtred]

Top man thanks. Second question - Who tf thought artex looked good? I mean, it must have been a post war generational thing, but my god? What the hell?

I hate the stuff but the wife isn't bothered so it stays. We've got some in the kitchen even and the bit above the cooker hobs is grim. I know it's not particularly dangerous but I don't really want to muck about with it even to wash it down

 

[Uhtred]

I've had two plasterers come and quote. One has refused to take the job because the parition walls are 'stramit' which is made up of compressed straw. It has a sort of paper lining which you can see in the 4th & 5th pictures in the OP but he wasn't confident that the plaster would stick properly, and indeed in the hallway we do have a partition wall with plaster just falling off it. We thought it was just the previous cowboy owner doing a poor job, but maybe not.

So I'm really stuck now, I just don't know what to do. I'm waiting for the other quote to come back (he didn't have any reservations taking the job on) but I'm worried that the work he does will fail like the wall in the hallway.

 

[Uhtred]

Man I thought my walls were bad. If money/time were no object i'd probably take it back to the brick, plasterboard and skim. It shouldn't be a too difficult job, just rip all the plasterboard off and screw some new stuff up with plasterboard screws, probably a DIY job to save yourself some cash (youtube is your friend). Then get a plasterer in to skim and make it pretty.

Only other option is to fill, sand, and neaten it up with lining paper - that screwfix stuff above looks good.

Except it wouldn't be back to brick, it would be back to straw! The external walls are dot dab and no problem, it's the partition walls which are this stramit stuff. We took down a wall downstairs soon after we moved in (the shower had been leaking) and the stuff we were pulling out you could put in your rabbit hutch

 

[Uhtred]

Liner paper in good hands can be excellent. Got one of our rooms done by a professional with this after finding similar terrible plaster and previous DIY and it’s still in very good nick over 5 years later.

Yeah this is an option. I wouldn't even contemplate doing wallpaper/lining myself, I just haven't got the patience for it. Are the seams of the paper noticable?