Home DIY

I'm afraid not.

Paper stripper or heat gun?

Paper stripper

If you mean steamer, are you sure you want to do it that way. It can cause more problems than it fixes. In my experience a 6inch blade on a t bar and the wallpaper removal liquid is the fastest method overall. You need to score the wallpaper really thoroughly first for either the steam or liquid to penetrate to the backing. Depending on the substrate a steamer can soften the walls or blow the plaster quite easily.

As Airhead says - fuck that: a good, old fashioned bit of elbow grease is required here...

@lynx I would hack out as much of the cracking grout as possible and get a good wide joint grout and start again - BAL and Mapei both do wide joint grouts, they tend to be the industry best so I would stick with them.

Just make sure you mix it well by hand and stick to the ratios they advise, work it into the joint for as long as you can, by going over it with your grouting float to get any air out of the joints which could cause it to go off quicker than intended. Best of luck mate

For anyone that cares; an update on my plaster walls (after peeling lining paper etc):

I tried priming it then fixing all the imperfections but it looked awful. Ended up using a finishing skim from Wickes (basically a big tub of filler) to completely do both walls (i'm now doing the rest of the room). Two coats of primer later and it looks like this:

Will paint the first colour coat tonight.

There are very minor imperfections where my skimming technique is slightly lacking but i'll finish and sand these down once the top coat goes on.

Pretty happy with the result so far but i have to tidy the skirting and picture rail before i'll be happy.

looks good.

Now to paint it gold!

Nice work, how challenging is it to skim the wall?

No thanks. It will be painted with "clouded pearl 1" on the big wall with the alcove painted "chalk blush 1".

What has my life become?

Not too bad, though i'd like to point out that it's more a skim with posh filler than actual plaster.
It appears to be about speed; going over drying areas just damages the compound. Once i realised that i wasn't going to get rid of minor tram lines until the sanding stage, it went much better.

Well done. The problems that you had are the reason I avoid the ready mixed skims, with the Easy Fill option you can make the mix wetter to allow an open time that suits the wall/size of trowel/skillz of operator. When the skim is drying you can usually spray it with water and polish it with the edge of the trowel, it takes a bit of practice though. In any case you'll arrive at the same end result.

butterflies, plaint it gold with black butterflies - I hear that's in right now

Our steamer belongs to my girlfriend's Mum, and she's being a bit funny about me loaning her Mum's stuff. However, I recommend picking up a large foam sponge and a bottle of wall paper stripper solution from Poundland. They have decent strippers of different styles too. The steamers can have a habit of lifting old plaster off the wall. A wet sponge is just as good in my opinion. If it's thick anaglypta or wood-chip, then perforating the paper can help too.

Anyone have a suggestion for some nice ceiling hooks to hold a pendant light cord. The cords are way too long at the moment so I want to shorten them by taking the cord back up to the ceiling and then have the weight hanging on the hooks...

I've found a few bits and pieces but they don't have anyway of arresting the cord to stop it just sliding through, so some kind of clamp mechanism would be good to avoid just looping in a figure of eight about the hook.

Have a look at this site - http://www.lampsandlights.co.uk/

If it wood chip then try to scrape the top layer of paper that covers the wood chip off first, the backing is very porous and comes off easily with wallpaper stripper solution. The solution reduces the surface tension of the water making it 'wetter' or more able to soak into the paper. Some of them have an agent which acts on the glue to make it easier to clean up.

@Airhead and @rodabod Cheers u guyz!

whats a 6inch blade on a t bar?

@soul that looks really good - gives me hope that I could do something similar. How long did the 2 walls take? This stuff?

Good advice. This is the scorer which I have that has been useful for the anaglypta.

I have many other tools available in Leytonstone if you are ever short - just give me a shout in case I have anything useful.

That's the stuff. The two walls only took an hour (maybe 90 mins) to cover but it's all the prep stuff. Process was as follows:

1. Strip wallpaper / lining paper
   
2. Wash walls w/ sugar soap
   
3. Wait 24 hours to dry
   
4. Cover with finishing skim
   
5. Wait 48 hours to dry
   
6. Sand out imperfections
   
7. Wash down wall to remove dust
   
8. Wait 24 hours to dry (shouldn't need to wait this long but I had work etc anyway)
   
9. 2x primer coat
   
10. Top coat
    
11. Beer
    
    

10 & 11 are still a work in progress.

Oh yeah, and I have the rest of the room to do...

sigh.

We have ours cable tied to the hook with one of those white-clear ones.

It's not too obvious, but there's probably a better way.

I'm curious about how hard it is to learn how to skim a wall, I've used the pre-mix plaster stuff to cover joints in plasterboard and ended up doing ALL THE SANDING, clearly my technique is rubbish - what's the best way of learning?

Plaster your garage