Painting tips for non-smooth walls?

[anon90210]

I am redecorating a room in my house before I sell and I have stripped of some ugly, peeling wallpaper. I want to paint the walls rather than put up wallpaper as buyer probably would prefer that.

However, the wall is not that smooth - it has a lot of imperfections (as well as the occasional hole that can be filled, there are uneven patches where the wall was painted under the wall paper previously and in some place the paint remains and others it came off with the wall paper...) and I don't want to spend days sanding it to a fine finish (it's a big room, and I'm short on time).

Are there any tricks I can use to cover this up so it has a decent painted finish? ie. is there a type of paint that is good at covering the imperfections? does gloss show up imperfections more than matt or eggshell? etc etc.

Or should I just throw on some wood chip and paint over that...?

[John Rumm]

Lining paper would be one option. The other is a bag of artex used as a filler - use it like a skim of polyfilla, and you will find that it sands flat very quickly and easily with no effort.

[anon90210]

With the lining paper, wouldn't you see the seams when you've painted over it? making it look like you just painted over some wallpaper?

[John Rumm]

To an extent yes. Depends a bit on how neatly you can butt the seams! ;-)