Look what I found under the wallpaper

[Donwill]

Taking old damaged wallpaper off a lounge wall I found this:-

it's GLOSS paint. Who would have painted their lounge wall with that??????????? :-(

Don

[Andy Dingley]

I have a stack of old Practical Householders as bog reading. The '70s ones are hilarious. "Burnt orange" as a colour for lounge walls.

[Donwill]

It looks like the first coat over plaster. Since the house was built in the 60s I thought they may have been on the waccy baccy :-) Don

[Huge]

When we redecorated a rented flat I lived in once, under the wallpaper in one room was written, in red gloss; "Celeste" hates this bloody prison".

("Celeste" was the name of the landlord's wife.)

(I didn't think it was a "bloody prison". Indeed, I tried to buy it from the landlord, but he wanted £22K and I could only raise £18K. For a 5 bed flat. In Hampstead. In 1975. Looking at houseprices.co.uk, it's worth about £1.1M now.)

[Owain]

I had orange bedroom walls in one house. Probably done in the 70s, and probably still quite popular in some parts of west Scotland :-)

The ceiling in this house was gloss painted onto the plasterboard. It peeled off in huge strips.

Owain

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember Donwill saying something like:

Somebody with a hooky gallon of orange gloss in the 70s.

[TMC]

That brings back memories

When we moved into this house some 35 years ago the hall and landing ceilings were just that colour

Made you want to duck when coming through the front door

Ours was either emulsion or eggshell not gloss however

All of the upstairs doors were royal blue gloss

Tony

[TMC]

We also put the same pressed hardboard 6 panel doors with the brass handles in around 1980 but they have long since gone

Still have the brass handles on the upstairs doors though

Regards

[Chris J Dixon]

A house I owned briefly had the smallest bedroom fully Artexed and painted a bold shade of purple throughout. I guess it must have been a teenager's choice. It was bad enough simply getting into the room without leaving the skin of your knuckles on the wall.

The upside of moving out was that this was one room that I escaped having to redecorate.

Chris

[Skipweasel]

I found a cartoon of a woman with "Auntie Marg" daubed under it on our kitchen wall. It was in white gloss on duck-egg satin hiding under wallpaper with peppermills and olive-oil bottles on it.

[Skipweasel]

House I worked on recently had all the woodwork painted gloss black.

Luckily it'd been put on so badly most of it just came off with a scraper in long sheets.

[Huge]

My eyes! My eyes!

(And I haven't even seen it.)

[Skipweasel]

Fortunately it was hidden under several other layers, too. Including one with images of china plates all over it.

[Owain]

Sexually explicit?

It sounds like the sort of design popular in the 70s when coordinating kettles, toasters, slow-cookers, tea-towels, roller blinds, wallpaper and crockery were fashionable.

Owain

[Skipweasel]

No - caricature.

That's about right for the age of the house. Very much the "We've been to Torremolinos on a package holiday and we've eaten garlic and had coffee in a glass" sort of thing.

[JohnW]

Yep, I painted my bedroom in burnt orange and midnight blue in the early 70s. I am not sure my mum was impressed at the time.

John

[The Natural Philosopher]

Ah, but did you also have a crescent moon and silver starts on the ceiling..?

[Lobster]

Same era; I did my ceiling in very dark khaki. Seemed like a good idea at the time, as I recall. My Mum still lives in the house; she still whinges about the number of coats of paint it took to get it back to its current whiter shade of pale.

Meant I was in a poor position to resist my own offspring's urges last year, though. However, when he announced he was going to use red gloss, I at least managed to persuade him to restrict it to the skirting boards :(

David

[Huge]

The room I am sitting in was the bedroom of the teenage son of the previous household. He had painted each of the walls a different very bright colour (green, blue, red and yellow, IIRC) and the woodwork the colour of the opposite wall. It was ... interesting.

[Donwill]

Latest progress picture.