Apologies for my absence, but I’ve recently had a hernia operation which has kept me from doing anything of substance.  So it’s about time I focus more on the site.

Foam backed wallpaper.  Novamura.  God I hate that stuff.  Our kitchen was obviously wallpapered with love and attention.  It was seemingly cut perfectly to fit round window frames, boilers, even behind the fixed pipes and radiators.

Novamura was marketed in the 70′s as pasting the wall not the paper – its thickness and polystyrene backing meant it didn’t shrink once put on and there is various rumours that you could peel it back off and wash it in a washing machine.

Give it to a small child and they’d instantly stick their nails in it which it would never recover from. 

Three days later, we’ve almost managed to exterminate it from our kitchen.  It seems it works best for us if you steam it a bit so that it shrinks and becomes a little tougher and you can then peel it off in 2″ sections.  It’s horrible.

Most green kitchen ideas use the idea of sustainability and ask you to hand over cold hard cash.  It’s green profiteering.  We’re going down the route of removing the rubbish from our flat and reusing it, whilst using things like the cupboard shells stay in place and are freshened with a 2nd hand set of stylish reused cupboard fronts from ebay.  The taps will be refurbished and sold on ebay and given modern 2nd hand ones.   The cycle of reuse continues.

The Novamura will however end up in a landfill site.  The toxic chemicals in it and the wallpaper paste make it impossible to use in any other way and it was badly damaged and peeling off the walls, so I couldn’t leave it there evermore…