1st Time Homebuyer in a Victorian Terrace Renovation

[Zip26]

Hi all. I'm in the process of having a full blown melt down over a house I purchased & got the keys for back in October last year. 8 months in now. At the time I'll be honest I had no idea what I was doing or what I was buying. I was finally in the position to buy my own property & wanted something older to put my own mark on. Initially I decided to sort out the living room area & my idea was make the living room nice, the kitchen doesn't need any work & then I can sort out the rest as I go. Anywayyy as time goes more & more of course turns up that needs doing (learning a lot as I go) & I ended up taking a downstairs wall out & taking the whole living room back to brick. It's been re plastered, electrics for the whole property have been partially rewired so it's more modern & up to standards & I thought it was now a task of redecorating. However as I've started sugar soaping the walls to get ready to paint, tidying up the areas where new electric sockets were fitting I'm realsing the majority of the plaster everywhere else is completely gone. When you knock it or quite frankly touch/push it you can feel how badly blown it is. When I was sugar soaping tonight I finally had the realisation of hell the whole thing needs repairing. I've been googling for hours when was the house first built to try to tell me if I should basically take the whole thing back to brick & re start & know I am completely overwhelmed. Literally sinking into my body as I type. I need advice as to what i do. I had a friend today come round to give me advice on the work I thought needed doing & the obvious cracks in the wall & it all seemed positive with a bit of filler but I'm now realising how massive a task I have taken on. Money is tight, I'm lucky my parents live 15 minutes away so I've been living at home & doing it up but in anyone experience/advice what do I do. Do I live in it & paint over the blown bits & fill them in? My thoughts are that's just covering up something that needs fixing. Or do I take the whole flipping lot back & start again. I have a third bedroom in the attic that's been converted & sugar soaping those walls I realised how flimsy/blown the walls are up there too. I wish money was in abundance but it's not & what the heck do I do

Sorry, this sounds horrible. No advice I'm afraid but hoping someone will be able to help so bumping for you.

old plaster will continue to fall away, its now old and dry, we had one bad room so plasterboarded over the mess and skimmed it. nobody would know. other walls that were ok, we just skimmed with bonding and then multi finish over the top and 15 years later its holding up ok.

If the house is damp it is worth investigating in a dehumidifier. This will suck out the moisture. This is what blows the plaster.

@bumblebee1000 THANK YOU so much for sharing. I feel like I'm drowning alone so this is good to hear. I'm stressing if I resell & when I do that they'll pick up the bad walls. I think that's why I'm in the headspace of sod it do I just rip everything down. Where the electrician has put sockets in the plaster lathe has totally come away literally a gap socket-lathe-socket on the other side-do I just ignore that & do over the top? Did you do that yourself.

@caringcarer It's been built along time ago & the kitchen definitely has some damp issues but how do I know if that's causing the walls to blow elsewhere?

Sorry I can't help other than say to consider an independent damp survey. Ours wasn't expensive but does not do rectifying work so you can rely on the recommendations. Some were cheap and easy to do.

Please also consider very thoroughly rodent proofing if you are looking at the walls. I have bitter experience of not plugging every tiny gap before installing my kitchen and now know Victorian terraces are notorious for ridents.

Be very careful about replastering whole rooms in an older house. You can end up with huge damp issues if you use modern gypsum plaster rather than lime plaster. Modern plaster isn't moisture permiable and goes weird and fluffy when it gets wet. It's fine if you are only patching bits though.

Don't panic about the plaster. Old houses aren't supposed to be perfect, that is one of the reasons why they are lovely. Are you sure the plaster is blown? Or is it just lath and plaster walls? Blown plaster sounds very hollow and if you poke it gently it will basically just fall off the wall.

If the blown bits are only small patches then you can just gently poke off the blown bits fill them yourself with some plaster. You can even buy ready mixed tuna of you want to make it even easier. You just spray the hole to dampen the existing plaster and then bung some new plaster in and smooth it off with a float. If you can ice a cake then you can do a patch repair on some plaster. This will also work to repair the bits around sockets.

If you want to make the walls even smoother after this, then you can put lining paper up and then paint on top of that.

The more expensive option is to get someone in to skim the whole room, but this could be £600-800 per room.

@Geneticsbunny it's plaster lathe but the bits I'm referring to as blown are hollow & where the wall paper has come away most of it just falls out. I've had the living room re plastered a few months ago & had no idea about that re lime plaster

I was coming on here to say exactly this. This is the advice you need to follow. Some people get lucky on internal walls with gypsum but if ifs an external wall, it has to be lime plaster otherwise theres a fairly big chance it will fail and result in damp issues

Only one wall in a back bedroom was very bad, i stripped off wallpaper and whole lot came down over me..nasty black dust and bits of horse hair etc...!!..As mentioned, you shouldnt really go over it all with modern plaster, we got lucky and it all held up together. big difference also in cost, bag of bonding is about £6 and bag of NHL is about £22...and dries out slowly....this wall was the last one to do and by then had enough of diy etc so we plasterboarded it over and friend skimmed it, an internal wall. other walls that have been skimmed with bonding and then multifinish dont seem to have any damp issues. have a small patch of damp on one external wall but nothing serious. there is the Heritage house website with lots of useful info on the lime plaster, also Chalkdown lime, supplier has info on their site. good luck.

@Zip26 is that the room you had taken back to brick? Did they plasterboard it first? You might be fine. Just hope for the best. 1st floor rooms are often ok with modern plaster it is the bottoms of ground floor rooms that can have issues but they are also sometimes totally fine. It depends on what is the other side of the wall and how well ventilated the underfloor space is.

I wouldn't worry about blown plaster it happens even in relatively new houses. In one house the plaster above the French door failed and the plasterboard came away and bowed alarmingly across the doorway. Some No More Nails squirted into the gap, mop and broom handles wedged below supported by books stacked on 3 chairs to hold it up while it set. Then careful use of filler to finish. Still solid now 23 years later 😂😂😂
Plaster is only cosmetic really, try not to worry xx

Before you go down the line plaster rabbit hole, assess the situation. Are they cavity walls? (Very unlikely in a Victorian house). Is the external brickwork and pointing in good condition? Do you have a dpc? (Most likely slate). Do you have adequate ventilation? Most importantly, do you have any damp already?
If no damp, good brickwork and a dpc, you’ll most likely be find with normal plaster.

I'm a fan of 2 pack wood filler and British Gypsum Easifill.
I’m not sure of what complications there may be with lathe and plaster, but you can spread Easifill like it’s plaster (almost) using an hawk and plasterer’s trowel and then sand out your mistakes.
Try on a small area and see what you think (2m2), then lining paper over the top if you need to hide the imperfections.

Don’t worry about it affecting the resale of the house. No-one will ever notice.

Alternatively get professional plasterers in and pay the price.

Good advice from @OneForTheToad

If you're up for not going back to brick and patching up the walls and ok with not having absolutely perfect walls you could get a plasterer trained in lime and modern plaster around for a second opinion. We thought our walls were in a bad state because some of it crumbled off with the wallpaper we were removing and were convinced a lot of it had blown, but turns out a lot of it was fine, there's usually some bounce in the ceilings, most of the crumbling was just the top layer and a skim was fine. For the smaller stuff you can get some lime putty and fill it yourself. We ended up getting our ceilings over boarded and skimmed with gypsum as they were too far gone but have mostly managed to patch the rest. There is a great lime plastering group on Facebook with some heritage experts. It does become a bit of a wormhole as others have said but also kind of fascinating if you like history