Heavy-duty room refurb now ongoing. After stripping off all the old wallpaper (Christ on a bike - who puts up a 4TH layer of woodchip? And on the ceiling?) I'll be getting the whole room skim-plastered before painting the bare plaster (which is currently original 100-year-old horse-hair stuff on brick.
In one corner of the room there's a pair of 15mm copper pipes running down from above the ceiling to feed the radiator. Hitherto they've been concealed behind poxy uPVC trunking, which looked really s**te, and I want to box them in properly now to make them as unobtrusive as possible. What would be the best way to do this (unobtrusiveness being the goal)?
I could do it in timber - run a pair of thin battens down the wall either side of the pipes (I could make enough room to fit one right in the corner), and then cap these with a piece of thin plywood; then paint these with emulsion the same colour as the walls.
That said, I'm thinking a better solution might be to cap my two battens with plasterboard, then clad the remaining exposed timber of the 'outside' batten with more plasterboard, and have my plasterer skim the whole lot when he does the walls. I *think* this would look better, but the boxing would be more bulky; would that counteract the better finish?
I suppose I could also just cover the corner of the room with a diagonal plate of plasterboard, and that would be skimmed?
Or, bury all the pipework under the plaster (would also need some chasing out of brick) - would look best, but isn't burying copper CH pipes a bit of a bad idea?)
Any thoughts most welcome!