Painting & prepping older house!

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Hi all,

Just moving into a new home (for us) and the walls were layered in a lovely floral green from the 1960's. I've managed to get all the paper off, however underneat, is an absolute mess.

A mix of patchy paint work flaking off and bare plaster. What is the best way to bring this up so that I can paint nice fresh white walls for the wife before she bury's me?

I had planned on sanding the walls as much as possible to take any flaky edges off, then give the walls a mist coat, followed by a couple of decent coats but am worried that the paint below will create a noticeable uneven surface.

Excuse the mess! It's a work in progress and not lived in yet, but will be very shortly.

Skimming isn't an option unfortunately - time restraints and most plasterers are fully booked for the next 3 months :(

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Get as much loose stuff off as possible, use a fine surface filler in the worst bits, then use a thick lining paper. Once painted it will look fine. You won't totally get rid of the underlying texture of the slight craters caused by the missing paint areas below, but it will be perfectly acceptable. Do use a matt paint and not a silk as this will also help to flatten the look of a flaky wall.

Ultimately the only perfect way is to re-skim.
 
By the time that you sand that flat, The Mud slingers will be available.
Looks identical to my first house.....Unibond and skim is the way !!
 
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Use a wallpaper steam stripper, or paint stripper like Nitromors ( nasty stuff ) it's obviously got a coat of distemper under those layers which you'll have to wash off when you get down to the base. It's a pig of a job. Wear googles when you wash it off as it's got lime in it, then use either an alkaline resisting paint or at a push a paint stabiliser before you repaint or for quickness just stick plasterboard on and either get it skimmed or tape and feather the edges out and paint directly making sure you water the first coat down, read the instructions on the paint tin, not many do. otherwise it will just form a skin if you paint a porous surface straight from the tin.
 
By the time that you sand that flat, The Mud slingers will be available.
Looks identical to my first house.....Unibond and skim is the way !!
Unibond won't neutralise distemper, the plaster skim would flake off over time and silk emulsion skids on Unibond.
 
Get as much loose stuff off as possible, use a fine surface filler in the worst bits, then use a thick lining paper. Once painted it will look fine. You won't totally get rid of the underlying texture of the slight craters caused by the missing paint areas below, but it will be perfectly acceptable. Do use a matt paint and not a silk as this will also help to flatten the look of a flaky wall.

Ultimately the only perfect way is to re-skim

+1

Just done almost exactly that, although, no lining paper. However got the walls free of all paper and paint first. Was lucky. 100yr old walls had been, what I could tell, painted once, and papered subsequently.

At one stage tile adhesive was used to put up highly flammable polystyrene lined wallpaper. That was fun to remove.

Scrape, wash,fill,sand,stabiliser,paint,fill,sand,paint. Used Farrow and Ball estate emulsion very matt.
Looks great. Managed a 21x12x8.5ft room over a few weeks of evenings. Washing and scraping paste, paint and distemper was messy.
Worth it.
Can't even see where the picture rail was.

[Edit]
Paper your walls.
 
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I always thought that distemper was the lime and water that was used to paint cellars.
 
Lime, hot water, colour, and glue.

Fairly washable so was practical in bathrooms WCs and kitchens as well as general house decoration.

The glue resists cold water but dissolves in hot, so you can scrub it off with hot water, using an old towel to rub it off before it sets again. It has a distinctive unpleasant smell when hot.

You're thinking of whitewash.
 
Lime, hot water, colour, and glue.

Fairly washable so was practical in bathrooms WCs and kitchens as well as general house decoration.

The glue resists cold water but dissolves in hot, so you can scrub it off with hot water, using an old towel to rub it off before it sets again. It has a distinctive unpleasant smell when hot.

You're thinking of whitewash.

What was the blue dye for ??
I'm talking about distemper mate ( not the dogs' disease ) and after 20 odd years of going to jobs where some bodger had Unibonded and skimmed it, usually a council worker, I was sick of scraping off the delaminated skim before I could do the job properly.
Don't slam the doors at your house without a safety helmet haha.

https://propertyworkshop.com/painting-decorating/distemper-paint/

Thinking back I used an industrial Steamer that I borrowed from the painting division of the company I worked for as the hallway was papered and varnished.
It was a beast of a steamer and enabled two of us to strip Hall Stairs and landings, Dining and lounge in around 5 hrs'. It used most of a large propane bottle doing it. And gallons of water. I remember the safety valve was a large plug of steel. It was like a steam room and the ceiling paper literally fell off. As did some of the skim ang probably the Distemper too which would explain things !!
 

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