The labours of Hercules

Why do I do this? Some of the renovating of my house hasn’t gone smoothly. In the hallway, my dear much-loved cat Tommy used to scratch the wallpaper.  When we were decorating recently, I thought a short-cut/easiest solution was to replace only the wallpaper he had ripped (bearing in mind he died in 2017 it’s been ripped for a long time) But I couldn’t get quite the same texture - no matter, I thought I could live with the difference. But my dear present day cat Portia, who had hitherto confined herself to clawing the furniture, decided that she had to try to tear down this more textured paper. 
So I decided to remove all the paper! This represents a couple of hours work with the steamer. And I have discovered horrible old dark brown and pale brown paint. Phil the plasterer says some surfaces are hard to skim, and I’m sure this is one of them:( There is a way to get around it, I think he has to cover it with something called ‘blue grit’ first.  It does seem awfully hard sometimes, but that’s ridiculous - I’m so lucky to have a nice little house.