We chose a smooth texture instead of the orange peel or “holy smooth” texture. You guys, it looks AMAZING! I absolutely LOVE how the walls and ceilings turned out. We spent about $400 in mud and tape supplies, plus the cost of the labor. We weren’t confident that we could get professional results with a Do-It-Yourself for this project. We have seen many DIY mud jobs that looked … well, not professionally done. We are wanting to move in in a few weeks and knew that doing the job ourselves would delay us up to a month!Ģ. We decided to hire out the job for a few reasons:ġ. Below I am removing the calcimine – a LONG process.Īfter some research (and some floundering) we decided that a skim coat of drywall mud was our solution. Calcimine cannot be primed or painted over as the paint will not adhere well and will eventually start to bubble and peel. I will devote another post to this topic, but the calcimine also complicated things. We also realized that some of our walls had calcimine paint. If someone were to rub up against the wall they would likely scrape their skin and get a scab! We also saw that there were some cracks throughout the walls that needed to be patched and we weren’t confident that we could blend the patches with the old plaster texture. **That being said, we were adding can lights to 3 of our rooms (living room, dining, and kitchen) and there was no insulation in the attic bedrooms, so those ceilings we DID remove the plaster and put drywall (shiplap in the attic bedrooms) up after we added insulation and lighting.**Īfter we removed all our wallpaper (this took us about 2 months!) we realized that the plaster is too rough to simply prime and paint over. I love the character of old baseboards! I feared that if we removed our baseboards (necessary if we were removing the lath and plaster), we would damage the them beyond repair or reuse. Plaster is HEAVY, dusty, and time consuming to remove.ģ. So much work is involved in removing lath and plaster.
If we were to remove all the walls with their imperfect lumps and edges we would lose some of that character that attracted us to the old house in the first place.Ģ. Here is what we discovered over the past 4 months, and how we ended up loving our finished walls: WHY WE LIKE PLASTER wallsįirst, I should explain why we wanted to keep our plaster walls:ġ. I do not like wallpaper, and I also did not like the idea of removing the plaster walls. The walls and ceilings throughout the house were covered with 4 or more layers of wallpaper. When we moved into our 1916 house 4 months ago, I had no idea what I was going to do with the plaster walls.