Lower part of the wall has Painted Pine T&G cladding with a piece of beading as a cap.
So as it was ...
and you can see the part where I need to extend the cladding along to and then around to the bath ...
I thought "I know, if I pull off the old beading, I can put a new one on, capping both old and new cladding and integrating them better", so I gave the capping a little bit of a tug using a screwdriver as a lever, and heard a bit of a noise - sort of like bits of stones falling.
But I started, so I'll finish .... Pulled a bit more on the beading (it was just standard 5mm thick type stuff) and the cladding started to come away from the wall
Oh ****
. Not a lot I could do now but carry on as the cladding on the edge was now bowed for some reason half way down. So I gently levered the cladding away from the wall, and THE WALL came off along with the cladding
OH **** Double **** .I have only a few days before tiled the whole wall above the cladding that was falling apart and had visions of all my tiling coming down as well
So quickly grabbed some battening and screwed it hard against the wall into the vertical studs right along to stop the lower half of the wall taking the top half with it, and then cut though the plaster above the beading to get a bit of a straight edge and separate top and bottom
Once that was done, proceeded to remove the cladding and after about two hours was left with this
And the icing on the cake? The wall was not very plumb, so where I had had to make good before in the old airing cupboard area, I had packed out the aquapanel to match the profile of the old wall, so now I had to pack out the straight plasterboarding to make it slope
and then put up more cladding to get back where I started from
So the job to swap a strip of £2 beading had turned into a wall rebuild job.
Moral of story?
If you see a Plaster and Lath wall, knock it down before it self-destructs!
Turns out that the Bead Capping was glued on VERY hard to the cladding; the cladding was GLUED onto the plaster on the wall and the plaster and lath system structure had totally failed and the plaster was just falling off the laths -
I suspect that the cladding had actually been put up originally as an way to retain the plaster against the wall
) - first wall like that for me, though.