Having recently bought a new house I'm in the process of redecorating and I'm quickly discovering that the family I've bought it from took little to absolutely no care in whether or not they damaged the walls when moving. There are lots of little nicks here and there which are easily solved with some filler and patience.
However, the walls in what are supposed to be my bedroom are the worst of the lot. They've clearly had something like a couple of mirrors or photo frames stuck to the walls, rather than hung, which when taken down have taken chunks out of the paintwork (see photos). Instead of filling the gaps and then repainting, they've just painted over the gaps leaving pretty deep marks. There's two of them and I kid you not they're both 4ftx4ft outlines about 1.5 inches wide each. Also sadly there's no wallpaper underneath that I could just strip and start on a fresh surface. The paint is straight on the plaster.
My question is on how to go about repairing them. I've had 2 suggestions.
1) Take a sander to the walls to get rid of the outlines, give it a decent base coat of white then paint whatever colour I want over the top of it.
2) Cut out the damage with a Stanley knife (like in the photo with the small strip of exposed plaster) polyfilla the gaps, sand to be flat then just paint as normal.
I suppose option 3 is just wallpaper over everything and hope it doesn't show though.
Can anybody suggest which of these (or other option) would be best? I've also the same problem up the stairs but not quite so large (thankfully!)
Cheers.