Painting Grandmas House

[carbonejim]

Hi,

Grandma's house was last painted in the late seventies of early eighties. It still looks good in most areas, except a certain wall has a bubbling look and some paint has broken off in the top corner. Under the paint I see a brown paper. It reminds me of construction paper in texture.

I need advice on how to prepare and paint this wall.

I figure I will need to scand the wall, espeially in the places of the loose paint. The I can paint over the wall.

BUT, I worry that this is a sign of drywall damage, or maybe wallpaper deep under the paint?

Thanks, Jim

[hallerb]

probably wall paper:( I would try removing some, if you dont it will peel more when you repaint:(

[carbonejim]

Dang! I didn't want to think that. Do you think I can try to remove some in the corner to test if this is really wallpaper? Do you think a steamer machine would be the best method?

-Jim

[RicodJour]

Usually.

R

[PipeDown]

Then again, the last coat did last over 20 years. You could wire brush the loose stuff off, prime and paint as usual. Just depends on how long you want it to last. Are you freshning up or prepping for sale? I'd be inclined to paint over unless the blistering was severe and all over the wall.

Main problem I see is the blistered areas come off, it may be hard to blend that in if there is a step at the edge of the paper. Sanding should work there though.

A steamer should work if there are not too many layers of paint on top of the paper and that paint is not too waterproof. You will need to score the surface first so the steam can get underneith. I think they sell scoring tools specifically for that purpose.

Just be sure the paper you see is wallpaper. Brown in appearance also sounds like the paper backing on wallboard which you definately do not want to remove.

[carbonejim]

FYI. for future home repair novices,

I made another trip out to her house and peeled off more paint for a closer look and to do some work. The brown paper under the paint was wall board. I wonder why the paint peeled there? Maybe some moisture got behind it. However, I don't see any reason to think this is a problem that will occur again.

I took a scrapper and knocked off all the loose paint. Many layers deep - once the walls and trim were painted torquise! I removed about the area of about a square foot, the rest was on there good. The paint removed was at least a millimeter thick that left a noticable difference. I sanded the area and the rest of the wall to rough it up. There were many, many bumps like they originally had crumbs in their paint. Was this a style? The whole house has these inconsistent bumps, but she never minded for this many years and they go back to before the torquise color. I used a belt sander to clean most the bumps up and touched things up by hand sanding. The paint that is on there is like steel! I covered the area that was down to the wall board with light joint compound usign a trowel. I also filled in some nail holes and nicks on the entire wall. The process was pretty easy. It did take some time to sand down that steel reinforced paint.

It looks pretty good so far. I left it to dry and won't be back for a few weeks. Grandma doesn't mind the joint compound/sanded wall look for now, she said it looks better than the wall peeling off.

Next time I'll lightly sand the rough spots down and put a layer of primer on it. I'm going to match the paint color and finish it up with a few coats. Entire project will cost $50 - $60. It's $40 now, but I am yet to buy the matching paint.

Thanks, Jim

[Banty]

I had a recent adventure where I discovered that some walls were painted over wallpaper, and the wallpaper preceded some remod work to create passthroughs, leaving me with the edgebead on the corners on top of the wallpaper. Plus the wallpaper adheres very, very well. In which case I patched and plan to paint again (as a front up approach).

What you have is texture paint that used to be used much more often than it is now. Sometimes it's a choice between live-with and repaint, mucho work, or just drywalling again. I've gone all three directions.

Cheers, Banty