Kitchen ceiling nightmare

This is a picture of my kitchen ceiling which is covered with nasty 80's polystyrene tiles. It has apparently never been plastered and the seams of the plasterboard are not even taped.

To make matters worse, at one end of the room the boards run across the joists but at the end in the picture they run with the joists and the joint shown is at the edge rather than the centre of a joist.



The adhesive used is hard like tile glue and is difficult to remove without destroying the surface of the plasterboard. There are also holes for downlighters which need making good.

Is this going to skim reasonably easily or would I be better off taking it all down and starting again? - a daunting prospect as it is around 5m square.

A further complication is that it is almost impossible to do the whole ceiling in one go because there are cupboards to the ceiling on the other side of the room which cannot be removed until others have been installed on this side if domestic harmony (already severely stretched) is to be maintained.

Has anybody got any suggestions?

From experience skimming old boards does seem to set the plaster much faster.
I would either pva many coats on the old boards or personally just over board the existing and skim.
Much cleaner than pulling down the old boards.

Good Luck.

Looks pretty easy. Tape the joints and then roller pva mixed with water 3 to 1(pva).

When dry pva again with thicker mix and skim whilst tacky.

Yeah, easy enough ratter. The only potential issue is if the boards arent staggered then there's the risk of a large crack appearing some time in the future.

Still, its possible to leave existing adhesive in place, scrim, PVA then skim.

Regards

Fred

Thanks for all the advice. I think I was being a bit dramatic with the post title but I was a bit appalled to find no plaster under the tiles.

However, you have convinced me that this isn't as bad a situation as I thought and I'll pull off all the tiles this weekend and see how the boards run.

It's a bit like the old joke:-

"When you're up to your neck in crocodiles, it's hard to remember that the original job was to drain the swamp"

Or in my case to refit the kitchen.

Thanks again.