Peeling layers of history

It's tempting to wonder why we didn't get out of this when we still could. The house is a quite extraordinary mess. It's not exactly derelict, it does for example still have a roof, but it's mind-boggling that people actually lived here until last October. It's layered with the filth of many decades; when I walked in for the first time with the estate agent it required a genuine leap of imagination to see beyond the dreary tobacco-coloured walls and shit-coloured lino that is covering up the beautiful oak and stone staircase.

In the last couple of days the walls in some of the rooms have been stripped back several generations to the original plaster; different wallpapers like palimpsests revealing the past lives of various rooms in the house.



My favourite is the wallpaper in our bedroom, which is the room which I fell in love with originally once I had got over the tobacco coloured walls. It's a lovely, peaceful room, airy and bright, with two floor to ceiling windows, a lovely curvaceous marble fireplace, intricate mouldings on the ceiling; long fingers of afternoon sunlight slant over the floorboards as if they were illustrating a story. The walls were patterned in a pretty pattern of rosebuds; it was certainly a lady's bedroom at some point in its history.





chambre de madame


The salon, now that the cobwebby old net curtains have been pulled down from the windows, reveals its many different characters; a rather dull black on cream repeat from the 1920s covering up a splendid midnight blue (which I stupidly didn't get a photograph of). And each layer scrawled with the notes of the builder at the time.



Most of the the last two weeks has involved the revelation of one nasty surprise after another; a radiator is removed to reveal a patch of damp wall; the dining room parquet turns out to be rotten, entire walls are literally unplastered brick. The windows are barely able to stay put in their rotten casements. But today a nice surprise - attached to a window an old projection screen, rolled up in its metal casing, in perfect condition. One day we'll be able to watch films on it. One day all this will be behind us.