Quillan Posted January 12, 2006 Share Posted January 12, 2006 I have just come down for a break in stripping of some old wallpaper. It never ceases to amaze me how cleaver the French are. This stuff is vinyl and as you remove it you discover that in places it's lots of bits stuck together. It's like a patchwork quilt yet every joint is invisable till you start pulling it off. It's like they have cut round the window and had a piece left over and thought "I know I can stick it in there". It's diffiult to explain, it's just wierd, like they get the absolute useage out of a role of paper and there is no waste what so ever. When we did the remodeling 3 years ago and stripped the rest of the house it was the same. Be it paterned or just plain paper every bit of the role had been used. So is it just me or have othes found the same. Infact has anyone come accross any other strange (OK different to English) decorating proceedures here in France? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Riff-Raff Element Posted January 12, 2006 Share Posted January 12, 2006 When we first moved into this house, my dear wife took it upon herselfone evening (I was away, not that my presence would have stopped her)to start peeling away the deeply unpleasant vinyl wallpaper in thefront room with a view to slapping on a coat of magnolia onto thelining paper she assumed to be underneath as a stop-gap until we (she?)decided how we finally decorate it.Instead of the expected lining paper, below this was a layer ofpolystyrene, and this in turn was fixed to the wall with what appearedto be a mixture of polyfiller and PVA glue that seemed to have beenapplied with a trowel. In places it was a quater-of-an-inch thick. Sofirmly was this layer of "glue" adhered to the plaster work that itcould only be removed in very small pieces with a blunt knife. This isa big room - 30 msq and about 2.4m high. On and off, removal of thislayer, which proved to be unpaintable, took just less than three years.There's a moral there somewhere. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dotty0 Posted January 12, 2006 Share Posted January 12, 2006 I am also having a similar experience with a room. Its about 20m2 and not only do we have the vinyl wallpaper/poly board combo, oh no, we have 3/4 of the floor concreted and in the middle we have, wait for it, floorboards. Not nice, lovely, proud to have them floor boards, but smelly, rotten ones. We have spent time removing them and even more trying to work out why on earth you would go to the trouble of concreting a floor only to leave a section untouched. Underneath is the earth floor, which at the moment is very damp.Why oh why?Dotty Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Teamedup Posted January 12, 2006 Share Posted January 12, 2006 Because Dotty O people would have been living on the earth floor before plonking the boards on it and some people still do live on earth floors. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dotty0 Posted January 12, 2006 Share Posted January 12, 2006 Yes I know that, but why go to the trouble of marking out an area so not to concrete it. It would have cost more time and money. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Teamedup Posted January 12, 2006 Share Posted January 12, 2006 Is concreting very cheap? Always seems to cost us a bomb to get our jobs done. I just imagined that if people are living on an earth floor they wouldn't have the fric to spend on their homes..... [;)] now there is a good bit of argot. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dotty0 Posted January 12, 2006 Share Posted January 12, 2006 Who said concreting was cheap? Seeing as the rest of our house has been 'decorated' and I don't think, by the bathroom fittings, they exactly struggled for cash, why not concrete the whole floor.Simple. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Teamedup Posted January 12, 2006 Share Posted January 12, 2006 Ah well as they say there is nowt so queer as folk. I have no idea as to why they would cover up earth with boards. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alexis Posted January 13, 2006 Share Posted January 13, 2006 I once visited a house where the very heavily patterned - brown - wallpaper was beautifully done but they hadn't bothered to match it up.Economy I suppose....I would like to know what 'glue' they used to use as it is a b**ger sometimes to get off the wall. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liz Posted January 13, 2006 Share Posted January 13, 2006 I think we've had the lot, bits stuck on bits, bits stuck on with filler, polystyrene underneath of course and a foil like substance presumably to 'treat' damp and newspaper - not an interesting souvenir edition but just some old paper from the 60s. An acquaintance of ours once said (and I have to emphasis this was a long time ago before we got to work) your house has that funny french farmhouse smell. It did and I put a lot of it down to the wallpaper and glues that were used. Now we have stripped everything back, fixed the damp and aired the place the smell has disappeared.We discovered an odd thing when we took up the fitted carpet that was glued to the boards in the bedroom (and what a job that was). The boards had been varnished except in a area about the size of a small bed. Could someone really have varnished a floor and not bothered to move the bed?! Wierd is the word!Liz Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alex H Posted January 13, 2006 Share Posted January 13, 2006 How about using bicycle tyres to cover up gaps in the floorboards ?http://www.alenda.freeserve.co.uk/house3_4.html Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Riff-Raff Element Posted January 13, 2006 Share Posted January 13, 2006 [quote user="Dotty0"]Who said concreting was cheap? Seeing as the rest of our house has been 'decorated' and I don'tthink, by the bathroom fittings, they exactly struggled for cash, whynot concrete the whole floor.Simple. [/quote]Had that part of the house ever been used for agricultural purposes inthe past? We discovered something not disimilar in a barn we renovatedthat was once used as winter quarters for cattle. It was a soak awayfor "liquids." Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dotty0 Posted January 13, 2006 Share Posted January 13, 2006 JondI'm pretty sure the answer to that is no. We had a visit from the relatives of the old man who used to live here, she also once lived here and was also born here. She told me that the room was part of the kitchen originally, now it has a partition wall, it that's the correct term, so it would not have had another use. We have barns to the back of the house and all are under the same roof, ie not separate. So all the rooms in the house back onto these, but there is an area for the drainage of 'liquids'.What do you use your winter quarters for cattle as now?Dotty Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Riff-Raff Element Posted January 13, 2006 Share Posted January 13, 2006 [quote user="Dotty0"]What do you use your winter quarters for cattle as now?[/quote]It's a gite now. I'm still intrigued by your hole in the ground though. These things are just not left by accident... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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