Dake A Raking

[ailbhe]

(Decorating, as Linnea said it, years ago).

One day, I will strip the woodchip from the walls, re-skim (actually, going on prior experience, re-plaster) what's underneath, and paint them up properly, basecoat, undercoat, topcoat and all. I'll choose colours for each room and buy the appropriate paint. There's a faint, faint possiblity that I'll even pay a professional to do the ceilings, which are... not aesthetically great.

But meanwhile I'll go on slapping paint on and brightening rooms up considerably using leftover paint from other people's decorating projects, and gluing dinosaurs over the top. I can make fairly large changes that way, even if it's not exactly what I would like.

And over time, Rob is less reluctant to view any decorating project as a precursor to months or years of living in half-done mess, worse than the original version, followed by days and days of fiddly boring painstaking labour, followed by not being supposed to touch or use the freshly fixed up area.

He's kind of right about it when it involves plastering, though. But I do wish we didn't have woodchip...

Comments

[cat63.livejournal.com]

Woodchip is awful to get off though - we stripped a room of it in our last house and it clung like crazy to the walls, even using a steamer to loosen it first. And the chips would somehow always get in under our fingernails, no matter how careful we were. Ghastly stuff.

[ailbhe]

It only has to come off each wall once though. And then you never have to paint over the damn stuff again - you can save pints of paint! Not to mention light.

[cat63.livejournal.com]

It only has to come off each wall once though.

True. It's just that it's a job to save for when you have plenty of energy and patience, I think :-)

It's interesting to find out what's underneath the old wallpaper too - in our last house, when we took the wallpaper off the living room walls, one of them had been painted a ghastly khaki green. I can't imagine hoe anyone ever thought that was a good idea. But then I suppose some folk might think the same about the primrose yellow we painted it ( I think it took four coats to cover the wretched khaki!).

[whirligigwitch.livejournal.com]

Woodchip is truly awful stuff. We have done away with some of ours but it's still in some rooms. And Artex ceilings. Ugh.

[ailbhe]

Yeah, our ceilings are heavily textured. I think they are Artex but some of them are suspiciously woodchiplike too. When we had a near-ceiling bunkbed we used to get skinned knuckles from the ceiling!

I would love to get it out of the very darkest rooms. So much. It just swallows the light whole.

[cat63.livejournal.com]

And Artex ceilings. Ugh.

Reminds me of the first house we rented in Wells in Somerset, where some bright spark had Artexed the walls of the staircase... It wasn't a very wide staircase either, so every time you carried stuff up or down the stairs you were in peril of losing skin from your hands. Bah!

[beaq.livejournal.com]

Is this woodchip?: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingrain_wallpaper

Horrible! I was also taken a little aback at the bit about asbestos.

[ailbhe]

I'd be amazed if woodchip as recent as 1990 had asbestos in it. Really, really amazed. But that's the stuff, alright; it's used to disguise poor plastering and bockety walls.

[hitchhiker.livejournal.com]

ah, i didn't know what it was called either. nasty stuff indeed.

[helenprev.livejournal.com]

I come very much from Rob's side of things and although I am looking forward to painting my living room (at Easter, hopefully), I am absolutely dreading it too. It is my eventual aim to become more like you in this respect. You are an inspiration in so many ways!

[ailbhe]

Well, I don't do it properly, and the chaos he dreads is associated with doing it properly - which DOES get a better result in the long run.

But if I waited until I could do it properly, I swear it would never ever happen. I just paint what I can reach and see; we disassembled the kids' bed today so I painted behind it, I'd painted the rest of that wall ages ago and stuck dinosaur pictures on it!

[ifimust.livejournal.com]

"But I do wish we didn't have woodchip..."

Buy a parrot. A largish one. They LOVE woodchip, and are convinced that there are GOODIES!!! behind it. At every possible place they can perch to get a beak behind it.

Seriously.

(However, this is not a serious suggestion to get a parrot. They're an incredible drain on time, fittings, furnishings and tempers. We had them for years and I'm glad we did, they were wonderful pets but they were also all the above!).

[ailbhe]

Oh, a parrot! Just what every household with three cats, two small children and another on the way needs! How splendid!

(I could put all its food in boxes labelled ACME though, so it's tempting...)

[clarahippy.livejournal.com]

I hate woodchip and had to strip the nightmarish stuff off our walls. I do prefer the rooms I made the effort to strip over the one I didn't and just painted over though.

[ailbhe]

I prefer the walls I stripped and replastered, too (stripping really wasn't enough, and nor was skimming). But Rob has a sort of fear that smooth walls will be clinical and cold-feeling, so I can't make him help me do something he doesn't want to do anyway!

[merryhouse.livejournal.com]

You could always put lining paper over the plaster. We did that in the dining room and the playroom. It's *just* enough to take the edge off.

The bedroom I had from the age of 7 contained woodchip, which we picked off bit by bit over the next 7 years before it was fully stripped. (Do your children do this? Ali and I appeared to find it irresistible.) Since then the room has been unpapered except for one corner, and the walls are definitely cold.

[radegund.livejournal.com]

*sporfle*

I shouldn't have read the suggestion that your house would end up feeling clinical and cold while drinking tea.

Dear me.

[ailbhe]

I find the squalor keeps me warm.

(OH GOD today it was AWFUL and the cleaning lady showed up an hour early so it wasn't tidy enough for her to clean properly so I will have to do it all myself ANYWAY and the skin is flaking off my hands and I didn't get a cup of tea or any food until TWO MINUTES ago.)