I have just begun work on my 1930 home in rural Oregon and one of the hot topics is the plaster and lath walls. It seems the typical solution in my town to repairing these walls is to remove them. This would be fine, but mine are in fairly good shape, with a few exceptions. The house has gone through some redecorating that included multiple layers of paint and wallpaper. In some areas it appears the lime coat is peeling away with wallpaper (using steam and chemicals to remove the paper) and the scraping-off of the paper completely smooths the texture out in other areas. On some walls the lime coat appears to just be peeling off the wall. In order to test my thoughts on the texture issue I painted a wall with kilz as a test. The result is not good, some parts of the wall are completely smooth and other parts have a sandy texture. When I've asked at the local building supply store about how to retexture or lime coats I usually get a blank stare and pointed to the joint compound isle. The solution being to sand the entire wall free of any texture, skim coat entire wall with joint compound, sand, prime, sand, prime, and paint. This just doesn't sound correct to me based on what I've read here and I lose the look of the plaster walls as well; which I can live with in the tiny hallway where I've already lost most of the texture, but I would rather not do that to the remaining two rooms with similar texture that is intact. I suppose that's the long-winded background of the issue, my concerns are: 1. How to properly finish the hall where I've lost most of the texture. 2. In the two rooms where the texture seems to still be intact, how do I deal with peeling lime coat and tie it into existing lime coat? 3. Is there an online retailer of lime coat in the US?

Thanks in advance for any possible feedback to this long-winded question,

Sharpe