In article ,
"Dave Baker" writes:
Trying to decide what to do about the walls the previous incumbent artexed
to stop his kids running their mucky hands over them. It's a vicious surface
which can flay the skin off your hands if you so much as lean against it.
House is a 1920s semi and the plaster consists of a soft and friable base
coat with shells and god knows what in it with a fairly decent hard skim
coat. However getting the artex off without damagaing anything else is a
bugger. I've tried scraping but that also damages the skim coat. Removing
the whole skim coat and the artex at the same time leaves the soft base coat
which is blown in patches anyway which need fixing and would need PVA to
stabilise it. So is it easier to just rip the lot off back to the brick and
plasterboard it or try and retain as much of the base coat as possible?

You can skim over artex -- you don't need to take it off.
If you start taking the base coat off, you'll always find
the next bit is blown too, until you've ripped it all off.
Blown areas don't matter providing they aren't too large
and the plaster doesn't move if you push against it. The
FAQ does have a tip for glueing blown areas back on.

--
Andrew Gabriel
[email address is not usable -- followup in the newsgroup]