Painting in Germany

It has taken me quite a bit of time to wrap my head around some aspects of German living and the painting of walls is one of them.

Germans routinely commit the cardinal sin of painting, or at least, what I was always led to believe was the cardinal sin of painting. Thou shalt not paint over wallpaper. "Not so!", says the average German, well, actually, he would display his disagreement in German, but you get the point. The wallpaper must first be hung and then painted! And not any old wallpaper, but Raufasertapete (left). The image comes from a lovely web page on raufasertapeten from the Sendung mit der Maus, a highly informative kids show. (Wow - there is tons of material on that Maus site! After my sister returned from Germany bearing chocolate, my neices have decided that there is something to this whole German thing after all, so I will have to forward her the link.)

I have tried to explain to D. that we don't do this in the States, that we paint directly on the wall, and on Saturday, in Hornbach (yippee-yai-yai. . .) I learned yet another tidbit. The whole point of the raufasertapete is the structure of the paper. You repaper when enough paint has been applied to the paper over time that the structure of the paper is no longer visible - in other words, when you wall would start looking too American :).

My thoughts on the process.

• It appears that raufasertapete is generally easier to remove than American wallpaper - that you can pull it down instead of always needing to rent a steamer.
• The raufasertapete covers cracks in the wall pretty well. (We live next to a major construction site and there has been damage to our building as a result of the rather significant vibration.)
• I haven't seen paint peel from raufasertapete (yet) whereas, I have seen it come loose from a wall with time.

I also seem to remember going into the paint store with my Dad as a child and picking out a color of paint, color X, from paper strips, and then pulling buckets of color X from the shelf and then taking them to the big paint shaker machine, where the buckets were shaken - but no colors were mixed. We did not receive a color cosultation and a recipe to mix our own at home. Ah, the good old days.

Here, there appear to be primarily huge buckets of white paint, into which one doses desired colors in desired amounts to acheive a certain color and mixes the entire thing one's self - well, one does if one is looking to save some money. Thank God, our little project of the moment only requires us to use white paint. It is more than enough for a start.

Here is a link to very basic information about painting in German. I just picked up a new vocabulary word or two - roller = walze.