1888 Victorian (Shingle style???)

[phil]

I guess we all have opinions but I'd open the plaster and insulate and then re-drywall but if you like plaster you can do that. I just dont see any visual difference and feel that insulation was a good invention. In my home I thought oh neat it's plaster and for one room I did some plaster restoration but by the time I was done I had flat walls and I stood back and said well that was a big waste of my time, no one has ever even noticed the difference!
I didn't feel it was worthwhile. I did do a room with ISO insulation then soundproof drywall and found that room a lot quieter. soundproof drywall is expensive but it blocks the sound of about 7 sheets or so of the same thickness. its harder to cut and about 75 bucks a sheet or so.

your house is older though so maybe you feel lath is an important feature. I dont see any benefit in rationalizing that too much because it really is just an opinion and you should do what you feel is best. We all have opinions.

I think rock wool stops sound more than ISO board but the iso board as a higher R value. what some do is try to retain the plaster and add loose insulation through holes in the walls and then repair the holes. walls that are not outside walls dont need insulation but I usually fill them just to make the house quieter room to room. you can just put 1/4 " drywall over lath and plaster but anything that adds thickness near windows and doors needs some adjustment to make things flush. some like the inconsistency of the lath and plaster and feel it contributes to the value, maybe it does if it is a museum. If I were at it Id save all the woodwork but bust out the lath and dont use 1/2" but 5/8th drywall and then it comes to about the same thickness as the original lath and plaster.

what I found was I got off the wall paper then it had water soluble paint and I had to wash that off, then use Kilz then I used drywall compounds. I know you can use plaster and do it the old fashioned way if you like.

the water soluble ( calcimine) paint was used because fresh plaster rejects other types of paint if you paint it before it cures up which takes months.
I did have one room whee they used a thin coating of colored plaster and it was nice under all the wallpaper but still had cracks.

the woodwork I would appreciate and restore as you are. I wouldn't stain it or paint it. to cover the burn marks I'd use an artist brush and some opaque oil paints maybe after you get some basecoat of oil or shellac on there so you know what color to match to. another option is to dig it out a bit and replace it with carefully blended wood colors of wood putty.
Take time to mess about with the color and It cant' be a monotone but when you hit on the exact right color you'll make the burns invisible.

what i'd do is try to mix wood putty to the lightest shade you see in your wood, then make another shade that matches the darker parts of the grain , then fill the lighter color completely. then scratch out how you think the grain should be running using a knife or pick. you can tie the pattern in to the grain pattern you have , then fill the rest of the voids. continue picking the filler or burned wood out and replacing it so it looks as much like the surrounding wood as possible. don't hesitate to put some oil or finish on your filler so you can see what the color is going to look like because the main thing is that when you are done with a finish on , that it matches then. what it looks like with no finish applied is irrelevant. also keep in mind the wood color shifts over the first year or two. The putty will darken so will the wood but it could be a bit of a different rate of change.
I fixed so many nail holes that I got pretty good at blending them in. It takes a bit of practice. I cover anything I dont want putty on with tape then pull it when the putty is still wet. wood is never monotone so any repair can't be either, or it will be obvious. the egg and dart molding might take some work to get right. artist paint touch up is likely faster.

you could go the other way and try to stain it all a dark brown but I guess it's about what you want. I really dont like staining wood unless I feel that it was originally. if you want something reversible you can use lacquer with toners . Like with stain, it will hide the grain a little and darken it , but if you dont like it it's a lot easier to give it a wash with a rag soaked in lacquer thinner than to remove stain out of wood.

If you stain one part then you stain something else and before long your woodwork won't match itself room to room. being a mantle I guess it doesn't need to match and you should follow what you like. It's your work of art

Phil

[Munch517]

I guess we all have opinions but I'd open the plaster and insulate and then re-drywall but if you like plaster you can do that. I just dont see any visual difference and feel that insulation was a good invention. In my home I thought oh neat it's plaster and for one room I did some plaster restoration but by the time I was done I had flat walls and I stood back and said well that was a big waste of my time, no one has ever even noticed the difference!
I didn't feel it was worthwhile. I did do a room with ISO insulation then soundproof drywall and found that room a lot quieter. soundproof drywall is expensive but it blocks the sound of about 7 sheets or so of the same thickness. its harder to cut and about 75 bucks a sheet or so.

your house is older though so maybe you feel lath is an important feature. I dont see any benefit in rationalizing that too much because it really is just an opinion and you should do what you feel is best. We all have opinions.

I think rock wool stops sound more than ISO board but the iso board as a higher R value. what some do is try to retain the plaster and add loose insulation through holes in the walls and then repair the holes. walls that are not outside walls dont need insulation but I usually fill them just to make the house quieter room to room. you can just put 1/4 " drywall over lath and plaster but anything that adds thickness near windows and doors needs some adjustment to make things flush. some like the inconsistency of the lath and plaster and feel it contributes to the value, maybe it does if it is a museum. If I were at it Id save all the woodwork but bust out the lath and dont use 1/2" but 5/8th drywall and then it comes to about the same thickness as the original lath and plaster.

what I found was I got off the wall paper then it had water soluble paint and I had to wash that off, then use Kilz then I used drywall compounds. I know you can use plaster and do it the old fashioned way if you like.

the water soluble ( calcimine) paint was used because fresh plaster rejects other types of paint if you paint it before it cures up which takes months.
I did have one room whee they used a thin coating of colored plaster and it was nice under all the wallpaper but still had cracks.

the woodwork I would appreciate and restore as you are. I wouldn't stain it or paint it. to cover the burn marks I'd use an artist brush and some opaque oil paints maybe after you get some basecoat of oil or shellac on there so you know what color to match to. another option is to dig it out a bit and replace it with carefully blended wood colors of wood putty.
Take time to mess about with the color and It cant' be a monotone but when you hit on the exact right color you'll make the burns invisible.

what i'd do is try to mix wood putty to the lightest shade you see in your wood, then make another shade that matches the darker parts of the grain , then fill the lighter color completely. then scratch out how you think the grain should be running using a knife or pick. you can tie the pattern in to the grain pattern you have , then fill the rest of the voids. continue picking the filler or burned wood out and replacing it so it looks as much like the surrounding wood as possible. don't hesitate to put some oil or finish on your filler so you can see what the color is going to look like because the main thing is that when you are done with a finish on , that it matches then. what it looks like with no finish applied is irrelevant. also keep in mind the wood color shifts over the first year or two. The putty will darken so will the wood but it could be a bit of a different rate of change.
I fixed so many nail holes that I got pretty good at blending them in. It takes a bit of practice. I cover anything I dont want putty on with tape then pull it when the putty is still wet. wood is never monotone so any repair can't be either, or it will be obvious. the egg and dart molding might take some work to get right. artist paint touch up is likely faster.

you could go the other way and try to stain it all a dark brown but I guess it's about what you want. I really dont like staining wood unless I feel that it was originally. if you want something reversible you can use lacquer with toners . Like with stain, it will hide the grain a little and darken it , but if you dont like it it's a lot easier to give it a wash with a rag soaked in lacquer thinner than to remove stain out of wood.

If you stain one part then you stain something else and before long your woodwork won't match itself room to room. being a mantle I guess it doesn't need to match and you should follow what you like. It's your work of art

Phil

I do have to disagree on the plaster point, I guess that's obvious since I removed perfectly good drywall to repair damaged plaster. I usually notice the difference between plaster and drywall just by looking at it and the difference by touch is night and day, plaster is also much more durable and moisture resistant, even versus green board. Probably the main impetus to me pulling off the drywall is that I don't like buried trim, sure you can pull off and trim down the baseboard but you can't do that with window and door frames, there's going to be less depth. Products like Plaster Magic and modern veneer coat make repairing old plaster pretty reasonable in my opinion. I'm not even particularly stuck on lathe, where the electricians took out large chunks of wall I'm using drywall as a base and doing veneer plaster over it.

The previous owner of my house did blown in cellulose insulation already, I know that causes moisture problems in an old house but it's going to have to do for now. Later on I'm going to come back and insulate the proper way: Pull out all the exterior facing walls inside and place an air gap material against the exterior wall between each stud and then spray foam over that. That will be an expensive project that will have to wait awhile.

I do already have the wallpaper stripped (see pics below) and it came off relatively clean with no paint underneath, one more pass with steam using a rag to wipe the glue off leaves a very clean surface. I'm using a similar painting method to you except Zissner Gardz instead of Kilz.

I agree on not really being a fan of stain, they did do a slight stain originally on my house but I will not be replicating it. I like a dark finish but only when it's natural and unfortunately it doesn't look like there's any walnut, cherry or the like in my house. For that mantel I think I'm going to simply accept what charring I can't get out of the broad face of it, but I may try to pull apart that badly charred horizontal piece and turn it around to put a new design on it. I haven't even pulled it from the wall yet to see if it's possible but I'll find out soon enough.

Here are some pics I took right after I finished stripping the wallpaper a week or two ago:

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I found a couple signatures from what I assume were the plasterers, dated 1894, I believe when the back addition was built.

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IMG_20200816_045340.jpg (1.27 MiB) Viewed 827 times

[phil]

that's pretty neat to find the signatures! you shoudl add your own , maybe in printing as well so future generations can read it ! I agree about the moldings. in my house I removed what wasnt; original and removed the lath to get the drywall the right height. what I did to fix the spiderweb cracks was to soak drywall tape in a thinned mixture of carpenters glue and then it never seems to lift or peel , I do all my taping and cornerbead like that. If I want harder mud I add glue to the mud and if I need to fill anything deep i combine plaster. I had some round corners to replicate and for that I combine plaster in the mud. the only walls I built out past the original were places without molding. I removed all the baseboards and I put them back over the drywall which I run to the floor. I skimcoat a lot and end up with pretty perfect walls. Yea the plaster shows imperfections which suit some spaces. I used the corner bead and did perfectly square corners even where there was plaster so it's hard to see any imperfections.

in some houses a flat wall would stand out and I do appreciate that your house is a lot older and so that may influence these decisions to use plaster.
Phil

[Manalto]

I'm in the original-plaster camp even to the point of (Bonnie, cover your ears!) leaving a crack or two for flavor. I like the texture, I like the way it absorbs sound, its tolerance of moisture and - this may be my imagination - it seems to make the house cooler in the summer. (I know it takes a good long time to warm up in the winter.)

Now, if I could only get the painted wallpaper off of my plaster...

[Munch517]

I'm in the original-plaster camp even to the point of (Bonnie, cover your ears!) leaving a crack or two for flavor. I like the texture, I like the way it absorbs sound, its tolerance of moisture and - this may be my imagination - it seems to make the house cooler in the summer. (I know it takes a good long time to warm up in the winter.)

Now, if I could only get the painted wallpaper off of my plaster...

Have you tried scoring the paint/wallpaper and using steam? I used the painters tool but they also sell rollers with spikes especially made to score wallpaper for removal. I got the $120 Wagner steamer on Amazon, it comes with a wallpaper removal tool that works well. Not that it's a quick process, that room took me 15-20 hours to do using that steamer tool with painters scraper and I still have to make one more quick pass to steam and wipe off the remaining adhesive. If you have thicker wallpaper and it comes off in big chunks it could take you a lot less time than mine did.

[phil]

I removed a lot of painted wallpaper from plaster. what I found worked is make the room steamy , like a sauna, boil water, I found the silly scoring gizmo useless but I scored through it with a box cutter horizantally about 2 inches apart. then tacked towels against the walls and wet them, and also used a garden sprayer to soak the walls down.
once the water creeps behind the paper it pretty much falls off. the score lines help get it behind.
Then I found a faster way, just hammer on the plaster and all the keys break , then it falls right off

[Manalto]

Have you tried scoring the paint/wallpaper and using steam? I used the painters tool but they also sell rollers with spikes especially made to score wallpaper for removal. I got the $120 Wagner steamer...

I got the Paper Tiger scoring tool, but I find it flimsy and awkward to handle. I think Phil's boxcutter method would be less fussy. I'd be thrilled to get the dining room done in 15-20 hours. The stairwell to the second floor is going to be quite a project.

I'm hoping steam will work. Last winter I bought a used professional wallpaper steamer from a rental place and wound up mopping a tankful of hot water off the floor. I'll check out the Wagner; I have the cheaper (smaller?) model, which looks like a toy. Haven't tried it yet. Winter is the time for this project on the Gulf Coast. As steamy as it is in the summer, I'm surprised the wallpaper hasn't already just fallen off of the walls.

Sorry to hijack your thread but thanks for the feedback. Now back to our regularly-scheduled program. Keep 'em coming.

[phil]

I didnt find the paper tiger good at all. If you are saving the surface you can probably just make cuts in the paper at an angle downward without pressing too hard and damaging the plaster finish. once you get a little gap then don't pull the paper off , just let it help absorb and capillary action will help it get behind. once water gets in behind the paper it drops. you can put plastic on the floor and some old towels or cardboard boxes to help contain any drips. If you go too crazy with humidity you may find the floor swelling but I didnt see any of that. some went to the basement but I didn't have much to protect down there.
I'd switch off the breakers for that room for electrical safety.
there is a carbide scraper tool with a thin wide blade, I found that helped. if you can get the paper split to sort of catch the water it helps. If you do less deep cutting and hard scraping then the walls wont get marked up. on mine I was careful as it had a nice green finish coating of thin plaster. no paint. I ended up not saving that but some may choose to. other rooms seemed to have the calcimine paint to deal with and I got that off by hot wet mopping.
you can get liquid wallpaper remover, it has some alcohol in it. the alcohol might dull the coating finish if you are trying to save a finish underneath. maybe a little soapy water would be better. soap or alcohol reduce surface tension which is what you want for it to get behind. that's what dish soap does, it reduces surface tension and that helps get the dirt off dishes. there are other "surfactants"

I'd explore one area and see if you think you will be painting it or if you might save the existing finished plaster If you know you are painting then drywall mud or plaster will fill any knife scratches easily. If you want to save finished plaster then go more slowly and carefully as to not damage the finish. you'll inevitably have some cracks to fix so I dont know how practical it is to try to save the finished plaster, if it has that, but some may want to try.

[Munch517]

I removed a lot of painted wallpaper from plaster. what I found worked is make the room steamy , like a sauna, boil water, I found the silly scoring gizmo useless but I scored through it with a box cutter horizantally about 2 inches apart. then tacked towels against the walls and wet them, and also used a garden sprayer to soak the walls down.
once the water creeps behind the paper it pretty much falls off. the score lines help get it behind.
Then I found a faster way, just hammer on the plaster and all the keys break , then it falls right off

I'm really sketched out by putting that much water into my house purposely, do you really think that's worth the risk for the time savings versus a steamer tool?

I never did get around to buying that scoring tool, now I know not to bother. I elected to just drag the edge of the painters tool across the wall because it's what I had in my hand.

[phil]

the water wont hurt your plaster walls. lay a sheet of plastic down and some towels. If the floor gets wet it wont' hurt much , if you leave it soaked for a long period the wood can expand and possibly buckle up. I'd check whats in the rooms below. If you have tenants or valuable paintings stored there that's different, mine was the main floor and my basement can take it. take suitable precautions. If you have wall to wall carpet, don't soak it. If the rooms below have finished drywall , or if the ceiling there is finished you might need to use more caution.
usually floors arent' watertight and water will find a way down if you create a pool. what you dont want is to lay plastic and let the floor be wet too long It takes time but boards can grow across the grain if you let them stay wet. If you have layers, like a laminate floor or lyno then water could be trapped there.

If it's painted wallpaper, I think wet the walls, the steam probably wont penetrate well but the more humidity the less the walls dry out. the secret is to get the water between the painted paper and the plaster in one way or another.
you could try pinning wet towels up, then just re-wet them and do that for a day. once the water gets to the paper , you're golden. less work scraping means less damage. Its just a matter of how to get the water behind the painted paper. you can try steam if you like. I didn't rent anything myself. I tried a little hand held steamer but it was junk.
if you want to dry things up use big fans, make it windy.
maybe if it's latex you can penetrate the paint with water but I didn't take that approach myself. I had several coats of paint.

i found that once I got a start I could work downward and wet the walls as I went , then as water ran down it tended to get behind and I worked my knife along to try to help it creep downward behind the last layer. if I took a break and left wet towels pinned up it almost went by itself so long as I returned to wet them every hour or so.

if you can get the blade of a walpaper scraper down about 1/2" then it forms a V for water to sit in, If you pull the paper away it actually slows things down. that V helps the water penetrate downward. If youwanted you could just make one score line near the top then work downward without scoring more. If you are not in a rush then time helps it creep in there and less elbow work is needed.


i had some walls that had plaster only down to eye level , plaster above and a scratch coat of plaster covered in old drywall. evidently it had panels or wainscott so the plaster was rough. the drywall repairs were eathered into the drywall which was applied when they ripped out the wainscott or panels. it was covered in painted wallpaper but i didnt fight that I simply knocked on the walls with a hammer and it fell and in no time I had a pile of rubble to go to the dump and empty stud bays.
I used a hammer for that stuff, it went fast. bang on it , it just cracks up and hit it again it falls like nothing.

the plaster rubble was easy to get rid of, old drywall can contain filler that has asbestos in it so any time you see old drywall work take caution. My dump wanted to see a report from testing to discard the stuff because of asbestos. all drywall here goes into the recycle process unless it is old.

I called the testing place and they told me any asbestos was in the filler so try to bring stuff near a seam. I got there with a piece that was not a seam. they took one look and said this won't have asbestos in it , I said good

I paid my 50 bucks, that got me the paperwork I needed for the dump. when I got to the dump , because it was old they had me put it in a pile so it didn't go int to the process of new drywall creation. If I had a positive test then I needed to buy special bags, it couldn't exceed 50 lbs each and they charge $50 for each bag. drywall after about 1980 or so has a stamp and if you have that then the filler isn't asbestos. but be aware that the filler on pre 1980 walls is likely to be asbestos even on plaster walls they often used drywall filler once it was used.


my attic had a mixture of beaverboard ( like cheap MDF only thin) and 70's panelling so it wasn't worth trying to save that. my basement had cardboard boxes nailed to the walls for some 50 years or so. I saved the shipping labels.
in my attic I found a bunch of pin ups ( 1930's movie actresses) they were on the inside of the drywall for the closets facing out. I took pics and left that point of interest where it was.

asbestos can get into your lungs and cause cancer. If it's wet and not blowing around , that's safer for you. If it's friable that's a concern. It occurs naturally here in BC. they mined it in the north, below Alaska, they dug it up for years until it got a bad rep for causing cancer. evidently jade is found as well so that was a byproduct of the mining operations. Because it is naturally occurring and not really an unstable substance it can be buried. I heard they ship it to Alberta. Alberta has massive tailings ponds of volatile crud from them basically washing the oil out of the tarsand so maybe it ends up in their crud pile or down some hole. I'm not sure what they do with the stuff. the places where it was mined here became ghost towns and were basically reverted back to nature as asbestos went out of favor and the industry vanished.