What is under the paint in an old Fife house

Why it matters

Almost every house in Fife built before the First World War is made of soft, breathable materials: rubble stone, lime mortar, lime plaster on timber laths, softwood joinery. Everything about those materials expects moisture to pass through and dry out again. Almost every product sold in a modern DIY shed is designed for the opposite: plasterboard, gypsum, cement and plastic paints that seal moisture in.

Put the second on the first and you get the classic Fife failures: blown harling, bubbling emulsion, black mould in the corner of a bedroom, rotting sash sills. Understanding what you are painting is nine tenths of avoiding all of it.

Lath and plaster walls and ceilings

Tap the wall. Lath and plaster sounds hollow and slightly wooden, and the surface is never quite flat. It is lime plaster, often with animal hair in it, pushed through gaps between thin timber laths so it curls behind and grips. It is soft. A fixing that would hold in plasterboard pulls out; a knock that plasterboard would shrug leaves a crater.

Hairline cracks that follow the laths are normal and cosmetic. Bulges that give when pressed mean the plaster keys have snapped behind and a section may need to come down. Do not fill a bulge.

1. Wash off any old distemper until the surface stops chalking, or nothing modern will stick
2. Fill with a lime based or at least flexible filler, never a hard cement product
3. Choose breathable paint: clay paint, limewash on bare lime, or a mineral paint
4. If the room already has sound vinyl emulsion and no problems, clay paint will go over it. Stripping sound paint does more harm than good

Lime harling and render outside

Harling is lime and sharp sand thrown at the wall from a trowel, giving the rough coat that finishes most East Neuk cottages. It is designed to soak up rain and give it back to the air. Limewash on top does the same. The pair have kept Scottish walls dry for centuries with nothing more than a thin fresh coat every few years.

From the 1970s many were painted with acrylic masonry paint. It looks fine for a decade, then the trapped moisture pushes it off in sheets, often bringing the harling with it. If your cottage has flaking exterior paint over a rough render, this is almost certainly what happened. Do not add another coat. It must be taken back and finished in limewash or mineral silicate paint.

Pitch pine, sash windows and doors

Victorian joinery in Fife is mostly pitch pine or good slow grown redwood, denser and more resinous than anything you can buy now. Under twenty coats of paint it is usually in far better condition than it looks. A sash window with rot at the sill and a rattling lower sash is a repair, not a replacement.

Old paint on pre 1970 joinery may contain lead. Test before you dry sand, and if it is positive, use wet abrading, a chemical stripper or an infrared stripper, never a blowtorch or a power sander.

Sandstone reveals, sills and steps

Exposed stone around windows and doors should not be painted at all. Paint traps water in the stone and it spalls off in winter frost. If a previous owner painted the dressings, the kindest fix is careful removal with a poultice or specialist stripper, or simply leaving it until it weathers away. Never sandblast sandstone.

Cast iron: fireplaces, railings, gutters

Cast iron takes paint for decades if you start on clean metal with a proper metal primer. Fireplaces should be finished in heat resistant paint or grate polish. Railings and gutters get primer, undercoat and oil gloss, with the joints and undersides fed with a fitch. Rust starts where you cannot see, so paint where you cannot see.

Anaglypta, lincrusta and old papers

Embossed papers below the dado were often original and are worth keeping. They take emulsion or eggshell happily. Painted over woodchip, on the other hand, is a 1970s cover up for cracked plaster and stripping it usually reveals why it went on. Budget for some plaster repair if you remove it.