I've just realised my hallway hasn't been painted for 27yrs!

[BoiledFroggie]

Can you beat that? We chose F&B oil eggshell because it was fully scrubbable with young dc. Now it's gonna be a bitch to remove the lining paper & start all over again.

I bought my house 31 years ago, my hallway has never been painted and there has been no carpet on the stairs for about 25 years. I'm a lazy slob.

I can’t beat it, but there has been a large hole in the WC wall for 6 years, and we didn’t actually bother to paint the upstairs bathroom after getting it refurbished 4 years ago, nor did I really finish repainting the kids bedrooms. My children think it’s normal to live like this 😐

You might be surprised. Steamers have come on a long way since back in the day. Screw fix sell a cracker for £30.

www.screwfix.com/p/titan-ttb772stm-2000w-electric-wallpaper-stripper-240v/929kj

That bad boy took off 5 layers of paper - nearly a hundred years worth of paper and paint. Even had a morris wallpaper layer and a middle layer had been painted with a gloss or eggshell concoction. It was like a rainbow the layers we uncovered.

You would have been horrified with what was left underneath. Back in the day wallpaper paste didn’t have fungicide in it. 🤢 Apparently it was harmless but I couldn’t deal with scrubbing it all off so we had the whole house skimmed.

At my last house which we purchased in 2009 we found a receipt under the hallway carpet for 1974 so 35 years!

I have a steamer but it's not strong enough to go through oil eggshell paint. Even with a wall scarifier it was a nightmare to do the upstairs landing.

When we moved into our first house in 2008 we stripped out the bedroom carpet (brown, patterned), and found heaps more layers of carpet underneath, a lilac, minty green, pub red, all the way down to an awesome purple shag carpet, underneath which was no underlay but instead was lined with a newspaper from 1960. Pretty bonkers!

We have found similar. It makes me so happy. I am in the US and found a questionnaire about the Equal Rights Amendment (circa 1972!) Also a school fundraiser paper from the 70s/80s (it was(is?) common here to sell candy, greeting cards and other things to raise funds for various activities).

I located some of the adult kids from the family that lived here then and two of them have come to visit and tour the house. Their stories are delightful.

Slightly tangential question but why did people used to lay newspaper under carpet?

Cheaper carpets were foam backed so didn't really need underlay and newspaper stopped the foam layer from sticking to the floorboards. You could buy proper floor lining paper but newspapers were much cheaper.

Our hall was already papered in shiny in parts paper, probably in about 1980, before we moved in 1997, we painted over it with something like Great Mills vinyl silk paint in about 1998, then in about 2015 we painted over it again with F&B modern emulsion, we will paint it again in F&B in a couple of years time, it's fine, paint went on very well.

Because it was cheaper than underlay probably

What's lining paper ? Don't you just paint over old paint? 🤔

I don't think I would get the paper off if it is sound, though isn't eggshell a less shiny gloss and meant for wood so it might not be good for painting over with emulsion. We have never had any problems painting over matt or silk emulsion though

Can't you just paint over?

Personally I would prime and paint over it

Why do you need to remove the lining paper?

Good luck with the decoration. Even though my grandmother lived in the same house for 61 years, it was never that long between any decoration.

Paint over it instead! Lining paper holds old walls together beautifully

Prime and paint over it. Life is too fucking short for stripping lining paper.

This would be me but DH insists on painting the whole house before Christmas every year. Drives me mad but the results are lovely.

Because the edges are now coming loose but also because you can't paint emulsion over oil-egg, it doesn't stick.

Oh this thread makes me feel better, I’m suffering from severe housebarressment atm, moaning to DH that we still have the marks on the hallway wall where the stair gate was fixed - the toddler it was for is now 17 and has all but left home

You want Dulux Super Grip primer: primes the shit out of ANYTHING. Goes over gloss, plastic, metal, glass, eggshell, whatever. One coat, then two coats of emulsion, done.

Forgot to say: you can glue down the peeling bits and use Zinsser peel-stop to stop any peeling paint/flakes.

I once moved into a house and while repainting the room,I tugged on a corner of the ceiling wallpaper-the whole lot came down in one huge chunk-I’ll never forget diving for my toddler dd as it clunked her on the head-it was solid
i moved 5 years later and still hadn’t repainted it

weve lived in this house for 6 years and we still have to paint our spare room and kitchen diner,I refuse to gloss,we need to replace all the eternal doors,replace the outside fence and buy new curtain poles for two rooms

itll get done when we’re dead and the kids have taken the house over