Skim over wallpaper?

Jun 24, 2004 15 Replies

Title says it all. On the ceiling of one of my rooms in my newly bought 1930's house is wallpaper. It is well stuck down and you can barely see the joins. It has a slight raised pattern on it I want to lose.



I thought if I give it a couple of coats of pva I could then skim over it with either finish coat plaster or one of the 'lose the artex' type products.



Think its viable?



Cheers


The plaster will stay wet for hours. The wallpaper will be damp for days. What sort of glue do you suppose they used?

Not really - it'll fall down.

Si

I would susupect not ..Given the wet consistency of the plaster or " lose the artex " mix you will be applying it may well soak into the paper ( before drying out ) which in turn will cause it (the paper) to stretch, bubbles appearing, paper starts to peel away from roof etc etc i.e the same effect you would get if you stood with a bucket of water and soaked the paper prior to stripping it. However give it a go on a small corner

Well, maybe Eric has invented a new way of stripping wallpaper.

Hmmm, worked pretty well in my bathroom... painted, papered, painted, plastered then artexed, lovely! :-)

Bugger to scrape the whole lot off though but I managed to get it all off pretty well eventually. ;-)

Mark S.

... and the stairs or do you have that delight to come?

However, you could keep it and hope that in years to come there is an Artex Deco movement.

.andy

To email, substitute .nospam with .gl

Bit of a slowdown at the minute due to work (receivership etc) and the fact I've two vans full of pcs and monitors in the house. ;-)

Mark S.

Oh dear...

.. an opportunity?

.andy

To email, substitute .nospam with .gl

I've still got my job worse luck, could have had 12 weeks at my house and my redundancy at the end of it. :-( Not a fortune but enough to fix the house up just about...

Wouldn't have got it if I'd been made redundant so swings and roundabouts... contact through work wanting them removing so I took two seperate days off and hired the vans myself etc. to sort it out for them. Got to go again in two weeks for another half a van load. So I'm busying fixing printers and monitors and pc's at the minute. :-)

Oh well...

Perhaps an opportunity to set up your own business?

.andy

To email, substitute .nospam with .gl

Ah well, there's always one :o)

Si

Although not a ceiling, someone's done it to the walls of my 30s bungalow with what seems good results, especially as the original plaster is rather crumbly now. Makes for an interesting historical perspective - found a piece of pretty old paper under the roomstat when replacing it.

I use pump sprayer to load wallpaper up with a good few litres of water then leave it for a couple of hours, occasionally returning to soak any dry patches. when soaked, most wallpaper / emulsion combos come off easilly

hth

To get it off, use a spray and then whilst it is still damp, apply a coat of walpaper paste. Before that dries spray again. Keep it damp until it falls off or is easily peeled.

Well I don't know what they used in my house, but after three of us took half a day to strip a 6' x 6' section of a 25' x 11' ceiling (using water sprays, "wallpaper stripper" sprays and steam strippers), I decided that plasterboarding over the lot and starting again was the best bet!

Steve W

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