Just underneath the roof of our house in France on the front wall is painted the date 1925.
This is not the date the house was built, the records of the town refer to it becoming a presbytery in 1900 and certainly the evidence of the stones of the house put it way back many centuries before that.
The 1925 must refer to a major refurbishment which the parish must have performed on the house.
To that make over we owe all of our excellent floor tiles and also we reckon the windows and shutters.

There is also evidence of a lot of 1920s wallpaper going on the walls then.
What is even more interesting is what preceeded the 1920 wall covering.

I began to find out this morning when I started to peel off the layers of wallpaper in our largest bedroom, the one we call the Family Room.

The first covering was a fairly typical of the 1960’s flowery geometric paper.
Under neath was the striped paper of the twenties.

And underneath that emerged that papers precurser, a hand painted wall.
The bottom half was painted brown possibly to imitate wooden pannelling and then there is a decorative dado band.
It maks me wonder about the hands that painted this and when was it done.
It has a sort of Belle Epoque feel to it and I would guess it dates from the 1890s.