ᐅ Removing paint from a house built around 1900

The house has a basement. The lower part is a rock cellar. Walls are 2 meters (6.5 feet) thick. The foundation is only thinly plastered. The foundation stands out. Under the plaster is slate rock. A complete renovation would be too extensive. Demolition would cost 10,000 Euro. Only simple exterior repairs are planned. The plaster has been there since 1890. There are only a few cracks. I applied about 2 cm (0.75 inches) of plaster to the foundation. However, it is dry from the outside. It may look damp in the photo. I just want to apply a little plaster and add new paint for the next few years.

No, it doesn’t look damp, and you can’t feel any moisture either: it evaporates on the surface outwardly. The paint only peels exactly where the evaporation takes place. The moisture carries dissolved salts, which crystallize as the water evaporates and cause the plaster/paint to flake off. Plastering the base was not the best idea; before, the paint above was still intact, but the base looked awful. As I said: just repaint it, but after 1-2 years at the latest, it will look exactly the same again. Or completely clean the base down to the bricks, so evaporation and crystallization can happen there where it doesn’t bother anyone visually, and everything above will stay nice.

Except for the stones? But I still have to plaster them with something, I can't leave the slate exposed. So far, the paint hasn't peeled off further. The coating has been there for about 100 years. The paint that is peeling off is also on the back side where the stone is exposed.

My question was simply how to remove the peeling paint, or if I need to remove all of the paint. Other options like removing the entire base would not be financially feasible and also not necessary. I just want to refresh it a little bit. The house is unoccupied and I only want to improve the exterior slightly. If needed, I could repaint after five years. That wouldn’t be a big issue. I have filled the cracks with acrylic. The house is built on a rock cellar. The cellar is relatively dry inside, extending about 20 meters (65 feet) back into solid rock.

The information that this is an unoccupied house, which is only going to be temporarily spruced up, might have been better placed in the original post. Just paint over it, and if it peels off again, so be it. As mentioned before, first clean it with a pressure washer and possibly a wire brush. That way, you’ll remove most of it.

I am new here, sorry.