To re-board, or not to re-board... that is my question!

[Valiante]

I recently bought my first house (hence this being my first post) and have started to tackle the first room, the lounge. The whole house has been recently painted by the previous owner, but the visible border under the paint, plus a few other things made me want to redecorate.

The original idea was to remove the painted wallpaper and to re-paint straight onto the wall. However, after removing three layers of paper, a border, plus a bottom-half which seemed to have been applied with PVA, the state of the walls was not pretty.

Aside from the many gouges I had made in the plasterboard with the scraper trying to remove the impossibly glued paper, there were millions of holes, rawl plugs (with filler over them!) and one or two fist-sized gaps. This made me consider re-boarding the entire room (three external walls and one stud wall).

Another factor is the amount of cabling I want to hide in the walls for the A/V setup (sky cable, speaker cables, power, projector feed, etc)... Re-boarding would make this task a lot easier. However, having considered the extra cost and work involved, I took the decision just to remove the plasterboard from the stud wall (and glad I did as I found old tongue & groove wood panelling, and a door - all boarded over!).

Having since removed all the skirting boards, I'm again undecided as to whether or not to re-board the remaining walls.. mainly because there are a large number of fair-sized holes behind where the skirting used to be.

So my question is, given the situation, should I just rip it all out back to the breeze-block and start again? Or is this easily salvageable?

 

[JohnD]

consider getting a good plasterer to patch and re-skim.

they work amazingly fast and leave a lovely surface (assuming you get a good one, so ask around for recommendations and have a look at his work)

 

[iwilson16]

So you have removed the plasterboard of just one wall? And are undecided
whether to remove it of off a second wall as well... ?

This sounds very similar to what I have just done. I ripped of dot'n'dab'd
plasterboard of a wall in order to run cat5, ct100, HDMI, projector trigger cable.

This was replaced with 45mm studwork and 12.5mm plasterboard.

But on the other wall I've just taken off the skirting board (since it was already
studwork and pboard). There were a lot of holes cut in the plasterboard
behind the skirting, and I needed to run more cables, so I simple cut off
the plasterboard at about 1" below where the top of the skirting will be.

This will allow me to tidy up the wiring. Where a wire needs to go thru
the bottom horizontal batten I will drill a 20mm hole it it, then protect this
from nails etc with a lid (very thin 70mm round disc of metal - available
from an electrical distributer).

Once all the wires have been neatly run, and protected, I will simply screw
plasterboard patches to the studwork. The skirting board will then hide
al this.

Only possible issue is that there may be edges of plasterboard that are
unsupported by studwork. If you think this is going to be a problem, then
get some 70x45mm wood, and bolt small lenghts to the wall with a
carteridge hammer (available from HSS for approx £25 for a day) so that
the existing plasterboard edge and the plasterboard patch edge are both
overlapping it.

If you do rip it all back to breezeblock, then its not too difficult job
to put up studwork and plasterboard. The carteridge hammer from
HSS makes this a breeze! A hundred nails and carteridges for it
will cost approx £20.

Hope this helps! (and isnt too long winded!)

Ian