Removing old plaster

[North]

Hi,
We bought recently a 1930's three bedroon house and we want to decorate the stairs and landing. I removed all the wall paper and the plaster seems to be loose in lots of areas. The plasterer has given us two choices:
1)Remove only the loose bits and then plaster & skim over.
2) I would remove the whole plaster down to brick and he would plaster over.
With option 1 although cheaper I feel that the plaster left would become loose in a few years and cracks would appear or when selling the house and knocking at the walls it would seem loose to the potential buyer.
Option 2 is more expensive and requires more work but seems the right thing to do.

Any thoughts?

 

[simonjay]

Hi,
We bought recently a 1930's three bedroon house and we want to decorate the stairs and landing. I removed all the wall paper and the plaster seems to be loose in lots of areas. The plasterer has given us two choices:
1)Remove only the loose bits and then plaster & skim over.
2) I would remove the whole plaster down to brick and he would plaster over.
With option 1 although cheaper I feel that the plaster left would become loose in a few years and cracks would appear or when selling the house and knocking at the walls it would seem loose to the potential buyer.
Option 2 is more expensive and requires more work but seems the right thing to do.

Any thoughts?

You can fix loose plaster by drilling some holes and injecting watered down PVA. Its worth trying an area before you decide to pull the whole lot down or not.

 

[joe-90]

Every old house has loose/blown plaster. It's probably been like that for the last 40 years.