the house is from 1959. Before I bought it the owners re-landscaped without any consideration for water flow thus causing the basement to have seepage through the walls. I fixed the water flow issue (1.5 years dry) but now I have painted cement walls that have paint pushed out/peeling with a few visible cracks and wonderful mineral deposition. I really don't want to spend the time with the metal wire brush to strip the paint off so I would like to just use hydraulic cement over the whole wall and then use a water sealing paint over the top. Is this a good idea? other suggestions?
That sounds more time consuming than just scraping off the peeling paint..... Here's 1 problem w/your approach, latex paint dries so fast that it actually creates a vacuum effect in doing so, which means that as it dries it'll pull off the surface anything that's not firmly attached, which is why prep work's so important to longevity. You won't immediately notice this happening, but w/the passage of time you'll be back to the peeling wall in spades. I've never heard of skim-coating w/hydraulic cement, but I've done plenty of patching plaster walls w/plaster of paris, what immediately comes to mind are the inherent problems w/working in a medium that sets up so quickly, I can't imagine how you'd get a whole wall covered looking even satisfactory (but I'm pretty picky, I figure when people are paying me I'm obliged to do a better job than they could've) w/out going insane in the process. I learned the trick to plaster, but I don't know the chemistry of hydraulic cement well enough to find a retardant for it. Anyways, I know prep-work sucks, but often it's just easiest to do it get it over with (start w/a stiff putty knife, by the way) rather than inventing a new process having to deal w/a long string of learning curves as you go. The first question that came to mind w/your question is have you ever skim-coated anything before so that you'd have even a vague idea of what you're getting yourself into potentially, but if you must create, than by all means go forth!
