The Power Of Woodchip

I’ve had the last week off work and decided to take the opportunity to sort out my home office (the virtual shed). It’s not the biggest of rooms – just over 4 square metres so I imagined that it wouldn’t take that long to do. I envisaged that the worst thing would be removing the woodchip wallpaper that covered the entire room. Woodchip is one of those things that were very popular in the 1970s and is usually used to hide plasterwork that has gone to Hell. It also means that it will have been painted over several time and will be a bugger to remove – in the case of the former owners of our house in bright orange and pea green. For this reason decided to invest in a wallpaper stripper.

I must admit that I didn’t really know what a wallpaper stripper involved but it is essentially a steam cleaner with a plastic tray that concentrates the steam on one small area of the offending wallpaper. I have to say it works a treat as the scraper just slides in under the steam treated woodchip. Unfortunately, after tugging on one bit of paper, a huge great chunk of the ceiling came away with it. As I have already intimated, where woodchip wallpaper has been used it is possibly the only thing holding the house together. Why this isn’t used on aircraft fuselages or in Formula 1 chassis design is beyond me but when used on houses it is structural rather than decorative. Why did I remove it? Because I’m an idiot, that’s why.

Clearly the whole job was going to take longer but I did discover a filler which speeding things up a bit: Polyfilla One Coat – a substance not dissimilar to marshmallow and with a similar weight but which dried within a day and was a doddle to sand afterwards. I decorated the rest of the room in those old favourites of magnolia and brilliant white and  laid carpet tiles in place of the knackered and cold laminate. It’s a big improvement although much of the space saving compared to the old office is actually technological: a KVM unit means I can have my works laptop and home PC running off the same mouse keyboard and monitor and I’ve managed to hide much of the cabling beneath the desk.

I was hoping that this would be my last DIY decoration job for a bit. I was half considering Artexing the ceiling to smooth over the repairs but that is the equivalent of woodchip for hiding duff plaster. I’m quite happy with what I have done and have no desire to waste another week on home repairs. Unfortunately, my mother-in-law called to say that her washing mashing was leaking. I’ve gone round and fixed the problem (a loose washer on the water supply). Unfortunately, the water has made its way underneath the lino and soaked the floorboards. It looks like I’ll be losing another weekend sorting that one out.