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the wall breathing learning curve: the long and winding road to wallpaper purchase
We've done a lot of reading about old houses and particularly old houses of the vintage ours is lately. (The main house - our bit - was built in 1950, and the inlaw wing that will be inhabited by my mother-in-law was added, with typical midcentury horrible disregard for the style of the original house, in 1967.)
The standard WW2 frontman's house, ours included, is almost always made of solid wood, including the insides of the walls, often with the surface of the wall itself made of a layer of thick cardboardy wallpaper over a layer of soft felty wood fiber boards. The standard house of this type was also frequently ruined in the 60s and 70s by renovators, and one of the biggest ways they were ruined was by the liberal application of plastics all over the walls. They're designed with only passive ventilation, and in their original forms and running with a woodstove at the center of them as they did when they were built, that works perfectly. But everybody switched to other forms of heating, and put latex paint or vinyl wallpaper or cementboard on their walls, and all of those materials are fairly impermeable moisture barriers, and with the air circulation potentially crippled as well and the outside surfaces of the walls now mostly watertight, they proceeded to get very damp on the insides of the walls and develop rot or extremely dangerous mold. There are a lot fewer of these houses standing today than there used to be, thanks in large part to renovations of this era!
Anyway, we're lucky and the internal structure of our house doesn't have any flaws, but the house DOES have latex paint or vinyl wallpaper in all 4 rooms downstairs. We've removed it from 2 of them so far, but there's still a layer of latex under the vinyl wallpaper we've started ripping off the kitchen walls, and now that the radiators have come down we've discovered a very suspiciously squishy damp part of the wood fiber board behind them. In this case the latex is painted right onto the original paper wall, so there's no way to scrape it off and leave the wall intact as in the previous rooms. We're pondering whether to take a chance and leave it, or attempt the frankly alarming task of hanging new walls-made-of-paper ourselves - which isn't the same as just hanging wallpaper, of course not, don't be silly! - though the contractor might have a recommendation once he sees the wall. I haven't thoroughly investigated the entry walls yet, but I fear they may be in the same state.
Also, when you're fixing the walls, best practice is to "let them breathe" going forward too, and that means natural materials. Modern wallboard is too vapor-impermeable, so the same paper wall substance is recommended (or of course wooden panelling would satisfy the requirement, but that's obviously a bit pricey). Mostly people put wallpaper over these paper walls, but you can paint them if you cover them with the kind of wallpaper that's designed for painting... but only with natural plastic-free paints. Chalk paint (or lime paint, as it seems to be called in the English-speaking Interior Design world) is ideal, and linseed oil paint is also perfectly fine (but is a bit more of a vapor barrier and can build up to be problematic in ~3 coats, as well as being much more expensive and slow to dry).
This is all very exciting to me because I love painting, and I can't wait to see what the lime paint and the oil paint are like to use (the latter for wet and high-traffic areas), but also a tad intimidating because almost all my (fairly extensive) painting experience is with latex and acrylic paints, and I understand lime paint has some very different qualities.
The reasons we didn't just go for wallpaper everywhere like people seem to usually do are that 1. I have always hated wallpaper in principle because of how annoying it is to remove/change, 2. we hate hanging wallpaper as well now, as we tragically know from firsthand experience with the tartan wallpaper of my MIL's summer cottage, and 3. it's actually a bit challenging (and expensive) to obtain wallpaper that doesn't have plastic in it! The standard wallpapers you see are usually made with a layer of vinyl and a lot of the ones that aren't vinyl are still impregnated with some kind of plastic to help hold them together and make them waterproof. Wallpapers made of paper are something of a specialty item usually associated with old house restorations and the majority of wallpaper stores don't even sort or filter them by this quality. Still, we're probably going to add a few wallpaper feature walls because we have to paper over every wall anyway, either with patterned paper or with paint-on paper, and any wall that isn't painted will be saving a step.
Also, we love old houses and are interested in the kinds of things that belong in our house and in its era, although we're not married to them as, like, a historical reconstruction or anything. But wallpaper was definitely de rigeur throughout the midcentury. The two patterns we've picked so far (the former to be used only in a single horizontal repeat alongside the chimney wall, and the latter for one wall of the kitchen) are extremely midcentury:
(Atomi by Pihlgren ja Ritola; Retro by BoråsTapeter)
I think I am alone here in having a harder time waiting to be able to paint it than waiting to be able to move into it (although in practice we're probably going to have to move in and camp in MIL's side while we paint ours).
The standard WW2 frontman's house, ours included, is almost always made of solid wood, including the insides of the walls, often with the surface of the wall itself made of a layer of thick cardboardy wallpaper over a layer of soft felty wood fiber boards. The standard house of this type was also frequently ruined in the 60s and 70s by renovators, and one of the biggest ways they were ruined was by the liberal application of plastics all over the walls. They're designed with only passive ventilation, and in their original forms and running with a woodstove at the center of them as they did when they were built, that works perfectly. But everybody switched to other forms of heating, and put latex paint or vinyl wallpaper or cementboard on their walls, and all of those materials are fairly impermeable moisture barriers, and with the air circulation potentially crippled as well and the outside surfaces of the walls now mostly watertight, they proceeded to get very damp on the insides of the walls and develop rot or extremely dangerous mold. There are a lot fewer of these houses standing today than there used to be, thanks in large part to renovations of this era!
Anyway, we're lucky and the internal structure of our house doesn't have any flaws, but the house DOES have latex paint or vinyl wallpaper in all 4 rooms downstairs. We've removed it from 2 of them so far, but there's still a layer of latex under the vinyl wallpaper we've started ripping off the kitchen walls, and now that the radiators have come down we've discovered a very suspiciously squishy damp part of the wood fiber board behind them. In this case the latex is painted right onto the original paper wall, so there's no way to scrape it off and leave the wall intact as in the previous rooms. We're pondering whether to take a chance and leave it, or attempt the frankly alarming task of hanging new walls-made-of-paper ourselves - which isn't the same as just hanging wallpaper, of course not, don't be silly! - though the contractor might have a recommendation once he sees the wall. I haven't thoroughly investigated the entry walls yet, but I fear they may be in the same state.
Also, when you're fixing the walls, best practice is to "let them breathe" going forward too, and that means natural materials. Modern wallboard is too vapor-impermeable, so the same paper wall substance is recommended (or of course wooden panelling would satisfy the requirement, but that's obviously a bit pricey). Mostly people put wallpaper over these paper walls, but you can paint them if you cover them with the kind of wallpaper that's designed for painting... but only with natural plastic-free paints. Chalk paint (or lime paint, as it seems to be called in the English-speaking Interior Design world) is ideal, and linseed oil paint is also perfectly fine (but is a bit more of a vapor barrier and can build up to be problematic in ~3 coats, as well as being much more expensive and slow to dry).
This is all very exciting to me because I love painting, and I can't wait to see what the lime paint and the oil paint are like to use (the latter for wet and high-traffic areas), but also a tad intimidating because almost all my (fairly extensive) painting experience is with latex and acrylic paints, and I understand lime paint has some very different qualities.
The reasons we didn't just go for wallpaper everywhere like people seem to usually do are that 1. I have always hated wallpaper in principle because of how annoying it is to remove/change, 2. we hate hanging wallpaper as well now, as we tragically know from firsthand experience with the tartan wallpaper of my MIL's summer cottage, and 3. it's actually a bit challenging (and expensive) to obtain wallpaper that doesn't have plastic in it! The standard wallpapers you see are usually made with a layer of vinyl and a lot of the ones that aren't vinyl are still impregnated with some kind of plastic to help hold them together and make them waterproof. Wallpapers made of paper are something of a specialty item usually associated with old house restorations and the majority of wallpaper stores don't even sort or filter them by this quality. Still, we're probably going to add a few wallpaper feature walls because we have to paper over every wall anyway, either with patterned paper or with paint-on paper, and any wall that isn't painted will be saving a step.
Also, we love old houses and are interested in the kinds of things that belong in our house and in its era, although we're not married to them as, like, a historical reconstruction or anything. But wallpaper was definitely de rigeur throughout the midcentury. The two patterns we've picked so far (the former to be used only in a single horizontal repeat alongside the chimney wall, and the latter for one wall of the kitchen) are extremely midcentury:
(Atomi by Pihlgren ja Ritola; Retro by BoråsTapeter)
I think I am alone here in having a harder time waiting to be able to paint it than waiting to be able to move into it (although in practice we're probably going to have to move in and camp in MIL's side while we paint ours).
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ETA: Ahh, I think I see the deciding factor. The Finnish shop is referring to silicate-based mineral paints as clay paint - perhaps that's to do with the precise connotations of the Finnish term for clay - and the slaked lime ones all as chalk (or rather, they only have the one word that means "limestone", "lime", and "chalk").
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I've used it on walls (easy, works wonderfully) and also tried it on wooden cabinets, which was less successful (not durable enough). It's just thick enough to feel sort of luscious, not really to the point where one might shape texture. I haven't tried mixing colours but I think it would work well for doing experimental stuff with colour directly on the wall while wet, the consistency and texture seems very inviting for that sort of thing!
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Our house has a stucco exterior, but everything else is wood apart from the chimney - as Finland is one big forest, this makes sense of course. I do love wood, but in my reading about lime paint I've been very intrigued by the idea of the other surfaces you can use it on. Well, I'll get to use it on cement in the garage and basement, but we don't have any natural stone or plaster, and that looks like so much fun.
I've seen several different chalk paint brands pushing it for cabinets, but apart from the fact that it can wear down, I gather that wax sealant isn't great for use in kitchens because it attracts the grease-dirt combo that you get from cooking and becomes impossible to properly clean. Of course, you can seal chalk paint with acrylic... and maybe with oil-based lacquer? Not positive... but this converts the surface into the sealant and you lose all the ability to touch up and repaint with chalk paint. So on the whole, I think oil paint is probably best for kitchen or bath cabinets.
Several brands of lime paint come dry and let you mix it yourself, and you can vary the water content and vary the texture in this way evidently. Some of the coarse mixes have bigger particulates in; and thinning it with water can be used to create a more translucent glaze of color. But I've only read all of these, not tried them.
The Norwegian brand Pure & Original has a thicker paint designed to produce texture that they describe as like "concrete or Tadelakt" and a product designed to be applied with a wet brush that they have misleadingly named "Fresco", and you can see they show different levels of texture and color variation, eg Traditional ("chalk paint"), "Fresco", Textured ("Marrakech Walls").
And this German brand has one with marble paint in it for texture here. And here's a somewhat exaggerated technique from the Annie Sloan brand using their regular chalk paint.
Oh, and here's an incredible Norwegian house all done in intense lime paint blues.
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That Norwegian house is gorgeous. I am a big fan of dusty, heathery colours. I will look forward to seeing pics of your painting experiments if you post them!
I've been painting mostly pure white on the walls because I finally dodged the cabinet paint question by having plain oil finished wood, with Welsh slate on top, and nothing looks quite as good with that as pure white does. I am resigned to regularly touching it up, but that's not really a burden with the claypaint.
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I will definitely be posting a lot about painting in the future, regardless!
Thank you very much for that invitation - we will keep this in mind (we travel rarely and with reluctance, but we do want to see Scotland and Wales). Also WE LOVE SHEEP. ♥
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I know next to nothing about restoring old (or new for that sake) houses, except that to take down old vinyl wallpaper is horrible.
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