The Walls!

We spent most of the weekend stripping the woodchip wallpaper in the loung/dining room and the front bedroom. We have decided to decorate the front bedroom as our main priority so we will have somewhere we can chill out whilst the rest of the house is being decorated once we move in. We are finding as the house was previously rented out a lot of the maintenance jobs have been quick-fixes so need to be re-done.
 
We did not know what the walls would be like underneath the paper but as the survey had said the house suffered from damp we were a bit sceptical as to what was underneath. The paper all came off reasonably easily using a steamer and some of it was already loose.
 
Below are some photos of the walls in the front bedroom. We are quite happy with how the walls as they didn't show any signs of damp. They mainly just need the indents filling in. Nathan had a go at doing this on Sunday and we painted the wall a thin layer of white paint mixed with water as this is supposed to help seal it. This also helped to show up how well the holes had been filled in. 

The next lot of photos are of the lounge/diner. The back half of this room was much worse than the front half. The front half was similar to upstaits with the exception of where the fireplace had been filled in as soom of the plaster was very loose here. There was a layer of cardboard over the crumbley plaster before the chipboard but this is all down now and we will have to remove the loose plaster. There was no problem with damp in the front half.

 
The back section of the room is where wer could see more signs of damp. There was a thin layer of polystyrene stuck to the walls underneath the woodchip paper.The walls were not damp underneath the paper. There was some red and yellow paint and all different kinds of plaster. There are some black water marks on red paint which is a wall leading to outside. The polystyrene is still stuck onto the wall a bit which also makes it look worse because it looks like white mould! The fireplace in the back room that is closed up has black marks. It does have a vent in the bottom but this has been painted over at some point.
 

The next jobs on the list are to carry on with decorating the front bedroom along with looking into some of the lose plaster around the fireplace and removing some of the random hooks, hangers and bent curtain rails from around the house!

We also want to look into the fireplaces downstairs a bit more as opening it up a bit could help with the back bit of damp and the font one has crumbling plaster!