Help...bathroom walls, old plasterboard, what to do

[flight]

Hello

I don't remember ever posting before but I seem to have joined up a while back, so here goes!

I'm in a rented property. My landlord has finally agreed to sort out the bathroom...it was fitted in 1984, nothing fixed since then really, and when we moved in 3 years ago the agents said 'it is horrible' and they weren't lying!

Anyway. I'm helping (euphemism for getting carried away and demolishing things...but I have just fitted the entire kitchen, so I'm not too bad) and today I decided to start taking down the old tiles, which came about halfway up the wall.

I did this because when we take the bath out, we'll need to disturb them and we'll never get a match as they are so disgusting, I mean delightful.
Was a bit worried but they seem mainly to be coming off, give or take a few digs into the plasterboard underneath.

It is an old house, but a conversion and the bathroom has stud walls.
Clearly water has got in at some point over the bath, but it ain't too bad. I want to take the tiles up to near ceiling height above the bath, this time.
The top wall is painted.

I'm not sure what to do about the board though. In places a lot of the paper srface has come off leaving plain white plastery stuff...(gypsum?)...in other places, there is rough paper surface. Others again have a thin skim of plaster on top, or some adhesive residue.

What would you recommend doing?

Options seem to be, line the whole room with aquaboard, but then the bath won't fit (it's tiny, only about 1685 wide so even a 1700 bath is pushing it). Get the whole room re-skimmed. But would this be waterproof enough?

Or just tile straight onto the remnants of the board and hope for the best.
Thinking of using 6" tiles to minimise cutting as there's a LOT of fiddly corners and angles.

And what is tanking...should I be doing this? I'm a bit concerned about the cost, landlord wanted to keep the tiles really but it was hopeless.

thanks guys

Sue

 

[PrenticeBoyofDerry]

How big is the bathroom and what extent are you/landlord willing to go.
The ideal solution would be to remove all the plasterboards and start again.
Patching and plastering over the existing boards will reduce the tile weight the boards can carry, unskimmed boards will carry more tile weight.
The maximum weight of tiles that can be supported by a plastered background is 20kg/m2, somewhere near to a thickness of 8mm in ceramic tiles or 7mm using natural stone tiles. When fixing directly to an unskimmed plasterboard surface the weight will be increased to 32 kg/m2. These weights include adhesive and grout.
And what is tanking?
Tanking is when you totally seal an area prior to tiling, to prevent water ingress, this is done in areas with high volumes of water will be, such as a wet room.
A shower over the bath usually does not need tanking but no harm in it.
Also aqua-panel is suitable for wet rooms and you will get away with using MR boards in the shower/bath area, these are also suitable for tiling directly on to.

 

[flight]

Thanks ever so much.

Well, I don't think he will want to go removing the panels tbh. I mean he might...but it will add considerable cost as I don't think it's something we'd do ourselves, and he'd have to pay someone.

Saying that, I do have a lot of time, which is my only real advantage over a builder/plumber, so I've chipped off most of the tiles now fairly carefully and the boards aren't too bad underneath.

I'm glad we don't need aquapanel, what does MR board mean please?

Thankyou for the info about skimming...won't bother doing that then! But I didn't know if we could tile direct to plasterboard.

If we leave the boards in place and just tile over them, some of it being the grey paper and some just white gypsum, what should I use to prepare the surface before tiling onto it?

Should I PVA it first, or just go straight on? Sorry, I did read the sticky about tiling but can't work out what would be best in this situation.

thanks again.

 

[flight]

By the way, not too sure if the weight matters a lot as I'm only thinking of putting on the usual small 150mm tiles, which are I think 3-4mm thick.

so in that case should I skim it?

Have got some naff ready mix plaster in a pot, I think it's cement based, I quite like using that but it might be entirely the wrong thing.