Blown plaster on chimney breast - Best method needed.

[Nealieboyee]

Hi All,
Apologies if this has been addressed before.
We are turning the wife's study into a nursery and have completely stripped the room. What we found was all the plaster on the chimney breast was blown. Now, we want to avoid plastering if possible so I was thinking of two options. Either remove all the plaster on that wall and then dot and dab plasterboard onto it, or remove the plaster and screw one inch thick battens onto the brick and put plasterboard on that.

I will say that the brickwork underneath is quite rough, in that it isn't perfectly flat.

The red rectangle is the wall in question (it's also a party wall!) Green rectangle is a plasterboard wall with bathroom on the other side of it. Blue rectangle is an exterior brick/plaster wall with a window in it.


Which is easier? Would you recommend something different?

Thanks
Neal

 

[mrrusty]

Drop all the plaster - be prepared for a LOT of dust and rubbish. Use a foam adhesive to fix new plasterboard. Scrim tape the joints, fix some corner angles and skim it (you can have a go yourself - for a small area like that it is very DIYable - youtube has lots of vids.

Foam adhesive (e.g. Instastik) has the advantages of being:-

1) Not much different in £ to dab adhesive
2) very DIYable (do get an application gun rather than the aerosol type) - you don't need a whisk and a big bucket which you really do need for dab adhesive (but you will need a whisk and a big bucket if you try DIYing some board finish!)
3) It's fast
4) If there are any salts in the chimney breast brick, it will isolate it.

When using foam, it will push the PB away slightly as it expands and goes off (adhesive foam is low expansion, but still expands a bit). I tend to fix up and then wack a few 5.5mm holes in with a mason bit and tap and screw some screws and red plugs in just to pull the boards level while they fully set. An alternative is some long battens jammed against the PB from the opposite wall for 10-15 minutes.