Original stair covering in a 1950s council house?

[Mike Mitchell]

What material would have been used originally to cover the stairs in a council house built around 1950?

MM

[PJO]

The council probably would not have supplied any covering.

The tenant would have probably used Lino or if they had a few quid maybe carpet - but not fitted to width. It was normal to only fit carpet to within four inches of the sides and the rest would be painted. Hinged type carpet retainers would be used to hold carpet in place.

Why do you ask anyway?

[Mike Mitchell]

Partly just out of interest, but because I'm redecorating and am deciding how to treat the stairs, e.g. full carpet, or paint alone, or paint + carpet runner and rods, or vinyl etc. Plus, if I decided to put laminate down upstairs, i.e. bedrooms and landing, there is the little problem of how the laminate should finish and blend in safely with the top tread nose, as one could not just leave a ledge.

Decisions, decisions!

I'm open to all suggestions for treating the stairs, providing they are clean.

MM

[Mark S.]

The nice painted strips are a bugger to strip off as well. ;-)

Mark S.

[The Natural Philosopher]

That tracks with my memory of (non council) houses of that era.

a narrow 'stair carpet' (fitted carpets were not in use much till the

60's) held in place with (in our case) rods and little brackets with screws to hold teh rods in. These were screwed to teh angle between the risers and treads. The carpet was moved up or down a few inches very few years to equalise wear. The pine treads were painted at the edges. Floral pattern carpets were more commoin than plain IIRC.

[Gavin Gillespie]

I seem to remember the stair carpet being of a cord weave, about 1/8" thick, which was probably for the hard wear that it was expected to carry.

[The Natural Philosopher]

It depends on whether you want to recreate a 50's look and feel, in which case (real?) lino and rugs is more the atmosphere than fitted carpets. This was teh era of Marley tiles, pine floorboards, and a few very threadbare, but highly patterned, rugs.

If you are laminating the landing, I'd simply use fiotted carpet, and finish with a small strip of carpet a tread width wide at teh top, with a threshold bar to neatend the join...but seriously, Id' carpet the landing as well.

Having grown up in a 50's house, I have no desire to repeat either the style, or the physical labour and lack of comfort of it.

Well I hope you washed the dried blood off first anyway.

My overriding memory of the 50's is of cold, damp, and endless filling of coal buckets to heat maybe a 2" bath of hot water, and, if you were lucky, one room. Hot water bottles, thremal underwear, and a vest, shirt, Gilet style setwer and jacket, all needed to be worn indoors to stay warm. Flooring of cold tiles on solid concrete, or thin rugs on wooden floors, iron beds, 'horse' blankets and feather pillows all of which gave me alarming asthma, to be finally finished when I went to colege in the late 60's and discovered that with central heating, and frequently laundered bedding, nearly all of the effects vanished...I am no great fan of fitted carpets, but they are a lot better than cold lino. Likewise I am no great fan of radiators, but they beat no central heating.

Try and imagine life without refrigerators, washing machines, dishwashers, central heating, or indeed oil, vacuum cleaners, where the standard window was an ill fitting sash or crttall style steel frame with single glazing, and meat was something you hoped to get in more or less pure form only once a week. And a car was something the Doctor had, or maybe the bank manager, but certainly not you. There was only one radio in the house, and usually no means to play recorded music - possibly a clockwork gramophone - and certainly no TV.

The only thing one could say that busses and trains did run, more or less, and were not much more dangerous or uncomfortable than they are today. And the post did work, with two genuine dliveries a day, and was pretty cheap.

Oh, and no speed limits outside of towns. But it was rare to exceed

45mph anyway.

Most of the population were very quiet, still pretty shell shocked. Rationing of food ended in 1954 I believe. The urban landscape was dotted with bombsites, and polio, german measles, scarlet fever, measles and mumps as well as smallpox were regular childhood ailments, sometimes fatal or crippling. You got more or less serious food poisoning at least once a year.

In winter the air stank of coal smoke. A good wage was £1000 a year, if you were lucky. £500 was more like it.

Thats the era your house comes from: Think long and hard about whether you really want to re-create the grimy misery of it, or whether ist better to just take the tired old shell, and make a decent warm and comfortable dwelling out of it.

[Mike Mitchell]

Retro is in! In any case, I already have central heating and the house is as warm as bread that has been out of the oven for an hour. I also think your recall of the 1950s is rather doom-laden. I'm from the

1940s meself, and I certainly don't remember life being as bad as you claim. I, too, grew up without central heating and "only" a real fire in a real grate to get warm by. In the winter, which even in the south invariably brought us six to eight inches of snow, I regularly awoke with ice on the INSIDE of the panes. But I didn't go hungry, I went to school, I could play anywhere, and actually learned to read and write, something which seems to have failed a good many school leavers today. I retained the Crittall windows, because nothing looks worse than a house with white PVC replacement windows. I like the slim, clean lines of metal-framed windows and am prepared to invest in a dehumidifier, if necessary, to deal with condensation in winter.

MM

[Mike Mitchell]

Any idea whether this is still available, and if so, where?

Thanks!

MM

[Mike Mitchell]

That's why I've given up trying to strip back to bare wood. The whole staircase would have to be dismantled to do that properly.

Also, I have read in several different Usenet threads something I was never aware of before, and that is that some people consider fully carpeted stairs to be inherently dangerous, especially for people wearing socks.

I noticed tonight that Homebase have "Dandy runner" on a roll, which you buy by the length, e.g. 10 cm for £1.19 This stuff was fairly thin and was 67 cm wide, i.e. far narrower than the tread. Could do the trick, maybe.

MM

[Mary Fisher]

They didn't in our house.

Not necessarily - we had brass stair rods.

Mary

[Mary Fisher]

??? Our house wasn't grimy and miserable! It was large and airy and clean, far superior to the scullery 2 bed back to back house we exchanged it for. And it was warm and comfortable.

Did you ever make holes in it with wwarm pennies?

Kids today don't know what they're missing - and I'm not being silly, it was magical!

Hear Hear again.

Mary

[Mark S.]

Took me about an hour a step to strip when I worked it out...

My mum and dad have carpeted stairs and I've never fallen down them yet even with a 50kg printer under my arm. ;-)

Mark S.

[Peter Parry]

Oh dear.

In many houses of that vintage that equates to a temperature of about

-3 deg.

Nope. Taking a bath (once a week) involved going on a course on how to drive a gas geyser and meteorology. If the wind was from the east you didn't dare light the thing or the CO level went from its normal

10% to about 80%.

Your memory has grown rose tinted spectacles.

The spawn of the devil.

Many things can those disgusting devices be accused of but clean is not one of them. Slime I would agree with - whole swathes of Darwinian fungi grew, evolved and died on those foul appurtenances

They were probably a French invention.

[Mike Mitchell]

Don't be so ridiculous. This is not a political group. Metal-framed windows are installed in countless modern buildings. PVC windows are horrid, cheap and nasty scammy products with only one purpose, which is to make their scammy manufacturers nice and rich while great swathes of Britain become contaminated with their ugliness - and that of the windows, too!

MM

[Mike Mitchell]

But if domestic stairs were never *meant* to be fully carpeted, then maybe carpet is just not the right material, unless of the thin, centred runner variety, held in place with stair rods. I mean, I don't actually *like* carpet all that much, as I have laminate flooring or ceramic tiles on the ground floor, which is so easy to clean. I'd like to paint the flooring upstairs, but it all has to fit in with whatever happens to the stairs.

To me, carpet anywhere, at least in any ordinary dwelling, as opposed to a mansion, always seems to look like a slapper wearing slippers, whereas a house with hard flooring had a far more elegant, straightforward feel to it.

MM

[Mark S.]

It's all person taste I guess but I know my bare wood ones are noisy as heck when you are tramping up and down them. :-)

Mark S.

[Andy Hall]

Only if you wear shoes. Once you have them beautifully finished, and that lovely blue wallpaper is gone you won't want to wear shoes on them.

On the other side of the coin is that they are much easier to clean when not carpeted.

.andy

To email, substitute .nospam with .gl

[The Natural Philosopher]

Perhaops your parents had the money. I just remember being ill, and feeling like I was growing up in a prison...:-)

[Christian McArdle]

Yes, to my bemusement, my wife is utterly incapable of going down our stairs without falling down them. I don't know how she does it. I think she must walk with a technique that requires sideways forces to be transmitted from the stair to her foot. It's not like the carpet is particularly slippery.

Christian.