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cimoreneWe'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).
(no subject)
Date: 10 Jul 2019 03:27 pm (UTC)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. ♥