What’s under my wallpaper?

[stuntbubbles]

Just bought an Edwardian house; every room and hallway has woodchip, anaglypta, or other raised relief wallpaper – in some lucky cases we’ve got it on the ceiling too, and in even luckier ones, two or three layers of the stuff, each painted. (Previous owners showed equal dedication to carpeting: underneath is often more carpet, then underlay AND plywood; extra nails in the gripper rods; my favourite is the carpeted skirting boards.) The bathroom they tiled straight on top of tiles. Hoping I’ll gain an inch of ceiling height and floor space everywhere when I hack through the layers.

Obviously I’m doing that “just moved in” thing of idly picking at layers of paint on the staircase or seeing if I can just remove random bits of wallpaper and making it all look worse: I can! In some places thankfully it’s just the one layer.

In the bathroom, walls are lath and plaster (you can see when peering under the bath, where there’s also some carpet); in the bedrooms, it’s this rough, sandpaper-feel grey stuff where I was expecting pink plaster. Is it plaster? Can it be painted the same way as plaster – mist coat needed? Will I need a lining paper to cover the grittiness instead? Is it another layer of something to remove?

everywhere is probably lath & plaster. Our house is late 20’s, we’ve generally skimmed the walls once we got through the layers of wallpaper but have just painted over a couple of rooms with the same grey plaster and the paint went on ok. We didn’t strip the wallpaper on the ceiling, just boarded over and skimmed (cornice and ceiling roses had been removed before we moved in)

our best finds were boarded over original doors and boarded over staircase.

Ah, we’ve got intact cornicing and roses so will need to strip the ceilings rather than board. All the fireplaces were ripped out but not especially well: you can see the outline of where they should be through the woodchip. Staircase also boarded over! Original doors intact thankfully.

Did you mist coat your grey plaster or just go straight to normal emulsion?

Is it lime plaster? There’s a bit on here about identifying it, they did put sand in it sometimes so that could be the grittiness.

www.homebuilding.co.uk/advice/lime-plaster

Ooh, I hope it’s lime plaster! Then I can indulge my favourite hobby of showing DP fancy colour cards from breathable paint and limewash companies who charge £100 a litre and all their colours are sludgy brown. (Absolutely my aesthetic, would like the house to be mostly empty except for sticks of uncomfortable wooden furniture and perhaps an expensive lamp, like a fancy monk.)

I’ll peel off a bigger section and investigate further. And order some fancy colour cards.

I think the grey stuff may be render of some sort, it used to be put over old walls as a tooth coat for plaster, maybe your predecessors didn’t bother with the top plaster but just papered over it. So you might have to plaster or skim to get a not too patchy finish. It might just be a filler which doesn’t extend over the whole wall, maybe over a previous doorway.

a word of warning about lathe and plaster: we had a very old house with l&p partitions which we removed. Our cats became absolutely infested with fleas, to the point where one of them was seriously ill with flea anemia. The vet said this often happens with old partitions, the flea eggs can survive for a very long time . Yuck.
The other thing to test for is distemper, it is almost impossible to paint over this with anything other than more distemper, as it is made from animal based glue.you might be better off leaving the ceiling and just repainting the paper.

I love your description of the monastic ideal. Of course, Fra Angelico decorated the cells in his friary,,so you don’t have to be too restrained.

Looks a bit like I get in my 1920s gaff where the top coat of lime plaster has come off. I suspect it may be an underlayer of lime plaster where the top layer has either come off, or as per a post above, not been put on in the first place.
I'd be tempted to get a plasterer to look at it- one that can do lime work. It's best to put a lime top coat on lime plaster, though it takes longer to dry than gypsum, and to use breathable paint like claypaint or limewash (and not wallpaper or modern emulsion paints). It helps the walls breathe and keeps the house dry.
the only place I'm having gypsum on a lime plaster wall is where it's an internal wall anyway and it's already been patched a lot gypsum with the lower section done in gypsum.
My go-to for claypaint is earthborn. Fantastic coverage, easy to put on, gorgeous velvety matt surface, but a limited range of colours. Lakeland have a wider range of brighter colours, but I haven't used theirs.

If you really do find pure animal glue based paint, then warm water will wash it off. I used to use it at work, in the theatre. You make it up with 'rabbit skin' glue, which comes in a powder. You soak the powder in water to swell the gel, then add warm water mixed with powdered pigment, and it has to be put on warm, as when it cools it sets to a jelly. And it can't be boiled, so you melt the jelly before use in a metal bucket, which itself is sat in a bigger metal bucket of water, on a gas/electric ring. However, the sort of distemper used in houses would be likely to have contained linseed oil as well, which would make the paint set waterproof, so warm water wouldn't get it off.

@Allthegoodnamesarechosen I bet Fra Angelico didn’t have to share with DD and her trail of stickers and DP and his carrier bags of wires, though. My longing for spartan misery interiors is a direct response to the clutter

@BlueMongoose Thank you for all this info! It’s made my heart sing; DP less so – he’d happily gypsum plaster the lot then slap up some trade brilliant white and be done with it. Whereas my paint schemes will have themes.

Will report back to thread once we’ve peeled off more paper and had someone look at it, suck their teeth, and quote millions.

I seriously hope that you don't have distemper anywhere. Our ceiling paint started falling off in patches downstairs so I spent weeks scraping it all off. Builder then declared the ceilings needed to be skimmed, tried to do it but the plaster wouldn't stick over the distemper. We had to have all the ceilings ripped down, re-boarded and skimmed. 🙄

That's drastic, I'm sorry to hear it. I've never heard of that problem before. Presumably the paint that wouldn't stick was because there was a lot of linseed oil in the distemper. I can't think of much that would have helped- the only thing that might have got it off would have been paint stripper, which on a ceiling would be a no-no. Paint of that vintage can't be sanded, unless you've had it tested and are sure there is no lead in it. Grim for you.

You could try pointing out to OH that claypaint will generally need a coat less than modern paints, so isn't as expensive as it looks, and is less work. 😇Also easier to put on in the first place.
In fact, it's not an awful lot more per litre that the upper range Dulux stuff, like Trade Durable Flat Matt, my current go-to for modern walls. Earthborn Claypaint, IIRC I pay about 82 quid for 5L, the Trade DFM in mixed colours is about 80 for 5L from Brewers although can be less from other places. The Dulux has a higher theoretical coverage than claypaint, 17m2 per L compared to 10m2 per L with the clay, but I find the clay sometimes needs a layer less. Another go-to for me is Dulux Light and Space, that's about the same price as the DFM.

We live in an Edwardian house - lath and plaster and horsehair in the plaster. If the lath and plaster is unstable you might just as well plaster board and skim or use gypsum plaster over brick.

We found a parquet floor under a revolting carpet. Didn't take much to get it back to its former glory.

You'll have fun restoring the place and sorting out the inevitable bodge jobs that will make any DIY job more complicated and long-winded.