Repairing plaster for painting - fill, line, strip or skim?

[WELLY417]

Hi
Just bought our first house - an 1870s terrace. Have stripped off all our wallpaper for painting but a bit stuck on how to repair plaster?
I guess plaster is in a pretty typical state for a house of this age - lots of nicks, chips and small cracks and patches of hollow sounding stuff (about 50%)
i'm inclined to leave hollow sounding plaster rather than hack off and start again because none of it is loose to the point where it moves when pushed or seems likely to fall of in the near future. Do experts out there agree or am i just being lazy?
Question is what is the easiest way to get the walls to a point where a painted finish will look ok? There seem so many options - fill and sand, skim, lining paper, smooth over products ...
Budget means solution will have to be DIY. Wondering if it would be worth the time and effort to learn to skim or if another method would be a better way forward for a DIYer.
Any advice much appreciated.

 

[NickStone]

Welly, on walls that weren't bad enough to skim, I've used Graham and Brown's Wall Doctor paper with good results. It's much easier to handle than the ordinary stuff and the great thing is that you paste the wall, not the paper. Hanging dry paper is a lot easier than hanging wet and it means you don't have the problem of pasting up to the edge but not over it. If you're not expert at handing paper, you can end up stretching or even tearing the ordinary stuff. Wall doctor gives a smooth plaster-like finish and will cover cracks and patchy paint. I bought mine at B & Q but you can get it in Homebase. Look it up here: http://www.grahambrown.com/us/store/wall_doctor.html

 

[WELLY417]

Thanks Nick, can i just ask if you did any prep to your walls - filled larger cracks and dents or is this stuff good enough not to have to bother?

 

[NickStone]

I did some filling, Welly. The point about this 'paper' is that it isn't particularly thick so when it's up, it looks remarkably like a smooth plaster finish. Its 'right' side has a vinyl coating suitable for paint. I'd say you could probably leave small cracks but large ones and holes would be better filled.