Thanks for the previous tips on PVA (1:5 dilution to stabilise old plaster and 1:3 over everything to ensure plaster sticks, especially to painted bits).
With that and a few viewings of this:
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tried re-skimming my first whole wall today. And it turned out not bad. Not pro - but just about good enough not to hack it off and start again.
It was rubbish after the first flattening in but the second ultra thin coat of multifinish magically transformed it.
Now the problem I had was the edges - inside edges mostly, but external corners too to some extent.
I found that no matter how hard I tried, I tend to have too little thickness there leading to hollows. I found it difficult to apply and work the plaster into the corners. All the natural motions with a trowell tend to want to take plaster away from inside edges.
Internal corners - pick up some plaster along the long edge of the trowel and then stick that into the corner first press on and pull horizontally out of the corner - repeat as necess. save vertical strokes for smoothing etc.
don;t try to plaster 2 adjacent internal corner faces in one session - far easier to let it go off and mix up again for the "other" side... before doing that wet the edge of the preiously done face (spray or brush) so the new stuff isn't sucked dry straightaway.
I usually suggest starting with the cupboard under the stairs, or the garage wall, or similar.
The ceiling edge is a more tricky version of the same thing, because pulling down vertically pulls the plaster off the wall. The way to do this is to do the wall up to that point as close as you can (say, within a trowel's width). Then you use the last bit of your plaster mix, which is probably starting to go off and stiffen up a little by this point, to do the same trick as above. It will still slide down the trowel face, but when you've got it against the wall (without hesitating, or you'll find it's all over your feet), you can pivot the trowel to force it back up to the top, and then pull away carefully, in a circular motion so you aren't pulling downwards.
(One of the most difficult ones I've done was a ceiling edge up against an artexted ceiling with thousands of little stalactites hanging from it. You end up snapping them off with the trowel edge and dragging them into your finish coat, wrecking it until you painstakingly pick them all out.)
A circular motion upwards in vertical corners is also a good trick to avoid pulling the plaster away.
Keep an eye on the straightness of the corner. If it's a wavering line, that's because you haven't got the plaster on evenly, and some areas probably need more plaster to straighten it. It's more important (visually) to get corners straight than it is to keep the wall perfectly flat in the lead up to the corner. You will find that in most professionally plastered rooms, the flat face of the wall comes out a little at the inside corners, and no one ever notices (unless they are trying to fit something perfectly square hard up against the plaster).
Andrew Gabriel coughed up some electrons that declared:
Out of necessity I started with a chimney breast - talk about making life hard :)
OK - think I understand that. I didn't find small amounts too bad at sliding off - it was when I had 1/2 hawk's worth then the floor got covered.
I did find that at the flattening out stage, I could detect this - I got a fairly long trowell (13" IIRC) and it does make achieving general flatness easier - one of the Marshalltown Permashapes. I must say it's very good. There were 3 of us on this, and at one stage my nephew has the good trowell and I used an old one, which was horrible (too flat).
I'll be sinking the electrics next week, so I'll get some more practise doing all the rest of the walls.
It's very satisfying doing a job with perhaps 20 quids worth of materials that a pro would charge 200-300 quid for :) I can live with less than perfect for that. For odd dints there's always polyfilla.
You can get a trowel designed for internal corners I believe .
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The external corner version can be more useful, although they come un-broken-in, and you'd never do anywhere near enough external corners to break one in, so you have to set to it with a file before it's much use.
Reminds me, probably 2nd or 3rd wall I did... Had just finished getting it smoothed out, waiting for it to go off some more so I could polish it. Wasn't going to need any more plaster, so I cleaned up and packed away the plastering table (a sheet of ply clamped to the Workmate), folded up the Workmate, which promptly toppled over and went crashing into the new plaster :-(
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