# Forum Home Renovation Painting  peeling paint

## TMW

G'day everyone. This is my first time here. I'm just starting work on one of the bedrooms in a circa 1950's, good old fibro house. Previous owners weren't very good with paint.
From normal movement in the house there are cracks under the picture rails etc with loose paint below them. I'm scraping off what is loose, some spots the size of a twenty cent piece but i'm sure i'll find larger sections as well. 
What's the best thing to use as a skim coat, that sands easily, to even up the surface before I repaint. The walls are the old fibrous plaster and some of the paint i have scraped off is down to the plaster surface. 
Any advice would be appreciated...........TMW :Biggrin:

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## Claw Hama

You need to hear from Rod the God of plaster but I would get a bag of cornice cement 45 (setting time) and run with that. It's fairly cheap easy to mix just add water, sets fast can be sanded easy to spread, sticks to most building material surfaces.

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## Ashore

Try "Top coat" I have found it easy to apply and sand back even for a mug like me  :2thumbsup:

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## Claw Hama

Hi Ashore, top coat is good where you have a good base but it doesn't always take as well to poor substrates and can flake out sometimes.

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## chromis

I've been using Gyprock's top coat lite premixed which is fine for small patches.  
If I did any subsantial patching I used cornice cement up to about a cm from being level, waited for that to dry and levelled it up with topcoat lite. Because topcoat is softer and easier to sand.

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## totoblue

> What's the best thing to use as a skim coat, that sands easily, to even up the surface before I repaint. The walls are the old fibrous plaster and some of the paint i have scraped off is down to the plaster surface.

  We've got a 50's weatherboard house with fibrous plaster.  For difficult cracks, I've settled on Nordsjo Super Filler.  It's slightly flexible, interior/exterior and easily sandable.  In deep holes, it shrinks a bit (just do another coat or two) but if there is any movement in the foundations (e.g. if you have clay soil and as you are no doubt on stumps and not on a slab), then the Nordsjo stuff is less likely to crack than regular plaster fillers. 
If you want to use normal plaster fillers, IMHO skip the DIY products stuff in the paint section and go to the plasterboard section and get e.g. Gyprock multipurpose joint compound.  Don't use plaster fillers over Nordsjo stuff as plaster is less flexible than the Nordsjo stuff - in fact don't mix brands because they don't always stick to one another. 
Also get a plaster hand sanding float and some of the sanding sheets that look like flyscreen (they don't clog like normal sand paper).

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