What have they used?

[musashi]

Well, a couple of days ago, I started stripping the wallpaper in my spare room with a steamer. The wallpaper has come of fine but the problem is the paint underneath.
Whilst taking the wallpaper off, some of the paint started coming off too but its as if the paint was also stuck to something else that was like a peelable film. My guess is whoever painted the room put diluted PVA onto the walls to begin with.
Because of this, when I get round to painting it, there will be uneven patches on the wall due to some paint going onto the plaster and some going onto the existing paint which was painted onto the PVA.
What's the best way I can go about this? I'd rather avoid having to strip it down to the bare plaster but if needs be, how would I go about taking it all off easily?

Thanks

Carl

 

[Albopalbo]

I know how you feel! I had a similar problem in my lounge. I ended up getting the walls re-skimmed.

There isn't really a way around it unless you really want to spend days scraping the paint off. Maybe a heat gun would help, not sure whether this would damage the plaster though. Don't try and use this one-coat skim plaster that you see on TV though. waste of time.

The only way to get perfect walls would be a re-skimming. Mine cost about £180 for a 3.5m x 5m room. Depends how badly you want perfectly smooth walls.

 

[musashi]

This house has been a nightmare. The girl I bought it from had painted the livingroom and the master bedroom. The guy she bought it from did everything else - and badly!
When I went to have a new kitchen fitted, I removed the wallpaper to discover that he had fitted the wall units and plastered half way up them and then decided to wall paper for some reason. Out of the 4 walls, only 1 was actually of any use. I ended to having the kitchen completely replastered.
Then in the master bedroom, he had put down laminate flooring. There are fitted wardrobes in there so he put the flooring down right up to wardrobes and drawers without leaving any gaps and then used silicone to seal the floor to the wardrobe and drawers, which resulted in the joints in the floor raising up after time.
The hot water / heating valve on the central heatign system was broken off and was rusty so if you wanted to turn it, you had to get out the pliers.
The guy who did that used to live next door. Then he moved in with the girl who had my house. The house next door also had problems.
He had fitted the kitchen and swept all the crap under the cupboards including countless tubes of silicone. The wooden tongue and groove cladding he used was stuck directly onto the plasterboard with silicone. Tiles were stuck to the plasterboard and worktop with silicone.
When my neighbour (who bought the house from this botcher) had a new kitchen fitted, he found a nail neatly placed between 2 wires underneath the plug socket.

Going back to the walls anyway. As I said, it's only the spare room so I'm not too keen on shelling out around £150 for it reskimming. So I may just paint it as it is and take the lightbulb out so I can't see what it looks like