Gut the room or work with what you have?

[englishteacha]

How do you decide whether to gut a room and start new, or to work with what already exists?

In the next few months, we'll be building an addition for my husband's office, and his current office will become our baby's room. It has the original construction from 1924...homasote walls (Homasote is like a pressed cardboard). It has hideous wallpaper at the moment. We have new windows and new window trim, and the original baseboard, door, and door trim are beautiful.

I am hoping to take down the wallpaper and paint the room. It might take the top surface off the walls, though, and leave them rough. That may require skim coating the walls with drywall "mud", or putting up "paintable" wallpaper. Or, putting up some nice paneling of some kind over the homasote (but that could clash horribly with the existing woodwork).

Our other option is to gut the room...rip everything down and drywall. This, of course, will be quite expensive in comparison to a few coats of paint!

Would you try to salvage the room as it exists or would you gut the room and start again? Why? I'm trying to get perspective!

 

[apnep]

An easier option would be to just texture over the wallpaper or use some wall paneling. That will save you the hassle of tearing off the wallpaper and the expense especially if you are not planning on changing the footprint of the room.

Good luck!

ETA: I read too fast, saw that you mentioned the paneling but I would still think about that as an option instead of gutting.

 

[HM]

Is there a worry about asbestos in the walls at all? If so, I'd do the cosmetic changes and not the gutting.

 

[ilovemk76]

Are the other rooms homosote or dry wall?

Personally I would gut the room, add insulation and make it exactly was I wanted.

 

[rock_doctor]

Just take down the old wall paper and move on. If push comes to shove you can "skuff" up the walls and put up a thin skim coat of drywall compound (plaster). All of the tv shows tell you to rip down and put up new drywall but what they don't tell you is that the original studs are never plumb and that will create much more work then you think. You only gut and redo when you have structural concerns plus if it is a 1920s house it may still have the old knob and tube wiring system and if so you don't want to be messing with the walls. Also remember if you change any of the studding you then may also need to bring the room up to current code.... If the existing walls are sound then strip the wall paper, fix any damage and paint.

 

[POOHsie]

My old 1900 house started off with wallpaper over plaster, then paint, then wallpaper, back and forth for decades. At the point we bought the house (2003) the walls were stiff and wrinkled, and the wallpaper and paint chipped off easily with a combination of a wallpaper perforator, sprayed on fabric softener and putty knife. So now I have the rooms down to bare plaster which I will repair here and there, and sand smooth. Why don't you try a small place on your walls and see how easy the mess comes off, before thinking about taking it down to the studs.

 

[NotUrsula]

I wouldn't mess with stripping the paper. I would put up wallpaper liner and anaglypta paper over it, then paint the anaglypta. (Anaglypta is white textured wallpaper that is meant to be painted. You can get fine-texture anaglypta that looks like plaster, which will probably match the look of the walls in the rest of the house.)

Good luck. Mine is 1934; so BTDT. (An owner from the 70's put that awful luan paneling over the plaster in several rooms, and glued it on, which ripped holes in the textured plaster when we took it off. Anaglypta is a very good friend to me, LOL.)