Paint not sticking to walls; Weird semi-gloss undercoat throughout entire house

[Matminster]

Hi, All.

So I encountered this peculiar problem and I thought I'd seek some wisdom. There's quite a points I'd like to mention so I'll try and condense into a still rather long bullet point list!

• Started decorating my house for the first time and started on a bedroom.
• All walls were painted with a thick cream paint, looks like someone did it all in a single coat and it looks awful.
• I removed some lining paper that was only on one wall and cleaned the paste off, revealing a semi-gloss-like lime green paint.
• The lining paper was really badly done and I thought at first they didn't use enough paste.
• The other walls just had the cream paint on the green paint (I could see in some patches after sanding back the old paint so that it was flat).
• I thoroughly cleaned the walls & filled in damaged spots.
• Painted the walls with a flat vinyl emulsion.
• Third coat finally covered the green paint, but started bubbling.
• Even the old cream paint started to bubble once fully wetted by the new coat.
• Bubbling only occured directly on the green paint (not the patches I filled).
• I tried sanding the green stuff to remove the shine but it clogs the sanding paper almost instantly and also goes super flaky creating a awful surface for painting.
• I decided to scrape the green paint off over the next week, it was on there like glue (a full weekend and 2 hours in evenings after work).
• The smell that came off the green paint after I removed it (from the revealed plaster) actually gave me a headache at one point. Strong chemical smell.
• The damage was so bad that I ended up using lining paper after using a ton of filler.
• Job is done now and it is a really good result. But it did take me almost 3 times longer to decorate the room than it should have.
• I then discover the entire house has this green paint...

So basically, I am now feeled with dread because I really don't want to have to scrape an entire house... The old wall paper and paint was obviously struggling to hand on to the wall, which is probably why the wall paper and paint job was so terrible.

Any ideas what this mystery green stuff is and how I could condition/attack it so that emulsions will actually adhere to it?

Thanks.
Matt.

 

[huckleberry finn]

adhesive primer will attach to that...then paint..just what I'd try...

 

[Matminster]

adhesive primer will attach to that...then paint..just what I'd try...

Yeah, I should have mentioned I tried this in the original post. I used Zinsser 1-2-3 bulls eye and something else I can't recall without checking. Made no difference. Emulsion still bubbled on 2/3rd coat.

Thank you for the suggestion though.