Date of replacement cornice?

[Nigel Watts]

Just started preparing for decorating in my first floor bathroom (a former bedroom).

The cornice is a simple cove, large, with quite a broad flat continuation on the ceiling and wall. I have been peeling the paint off it in sheets revealing a solid pink plaster construction, which must have been run in-situ, and originally decorated in distemper or white wash, hence the peeling paint, and patched up here and here in very hard pollfilla which is impossible to remove without damaging the softer plaster. Ceiling is plasterboard over original lath and must have been repaired before the cornice was put up.

Plasterboard and modern plaster, but run in-situ and decorated with distemper or whitewash. 1960s perhaps?

Needless to say the hard gypsum of the cornice and one of the replastered stud walls has not married well with the original lime nor coped well with the movememt of the house. The cornice is badly cracked in a number of places and the gypsum has weakened the lime in the corner of the room where walls made of these different materials join and where there has been some movement; the gypsum seems to have pulled the lime from the wall as it moved (if it had all been lime it would still have cracked but probably remained adhered to the walls).

 

[Penners]

Dear old gypsum. Where would we be without it? :roll:

I'm sure your date estimate for those "repairs" is going to be much more accurate than any I would come up with, Nigel. But I wonder whether distemper or whitewash might not place the work a bit earlier than the '60s. My (very flawed) memory suggests to me that vinyl emulsion paints were pretty well established by then. And if the repairer used gypsum, it seems unlikely that they would then apply distemper for conservation reasons.

With limited confidence, I think I might date the repairs a decade or so earlier.

 

[Nigel Watts]

I think you must be right. Having Googled around a bit it seems that plasterboard came into general use in the 1950s or perhaps even the late 1940s. Where I live was a slum until the late 70s so it is interesting that someone went to the trouble of putting up a cornice, but again this may suggest an earlier date. By the 60s they probably wouldn't have bothered.