Painting the walls of an ex-council house.

I have recent bought an ex-council house. It was built in the early 70ies, and the walls are constructed of concrete slabs, ie one concrete slab forms one wall. The surface of this (I've been stripping wallpaper) varies. In some places it is perfectly smooth, in other places there are minor holes caused by air-bubbles when the slab was being formed. There are a few damage marks. Where the walls/ceilings meet are problem areas.
Basically I want to know what my options are, taking the following into account:
I don't want to get a plasterer in, I assume the rate is €30 per hour, or €40 for a reliable one.
I don't want to wallpaper, it looks naff.
I want to paint the walls. Some of my painting plans involve bagging/sponging glaze techniques so this may also help hide blemishes.

What does painted lining paper look like anyway? I've read a few posts but does it not reveal the join of the paper?

Hi William,

IMHO you are right to go for painted walls but with the problems that you have it won't be easy to achieve.

With the problem of the join at the wall/ceiling one option to disguise this is to use coving, the plainer the better

Your best approach overall to solve the bad walls would be to get them skimmed but as you say plasterer's time is not cheap. TV3 had an item recently where they showed how to plaster walls yourself. Les Swarbrigg from Woodies's showed how it was done. It seemed a time consuming, messy type of job but they did mention that one guy had plastered the whole house using their product. Can't find it on the www.woodies.ie site but you might be able to ask in the shop.

Can't recall seeing painted lining paper and like you say would have to wonder about the joins?

I reckon this is what you are looking for

[broken link removed]

Good Luck