Auro Paint On-Line Colour Chooser

Auro have developed a new tool for choosing colours for the different rooms in your house. This is a free on-line interaction programme that allows you to choose different designs for walls and wood quickly and easily so that you can get a good idea about which paints might suit your specific requirements / look.

The colours listed are not named like the Auro UK swatches and colour cards, but there will be a guide coming out soon. The Eco Home Centre has lists of all the colours (in their original Germany format) and so can advise as necessary in the meantime.

So go on and have a play with it at http://auro.de/en/colour_designer/index.php

Gypsum in old houses

I called LaFarge a couple of weeks ago to see if they had a product that might solve an issue I had some with very old lime plaster / render in my home. This was the response from their Technical Helpdesk.

'Sorry Sir, (with regard to internal plastering) we only make gypsum based products and so none of these would be suitable for use over lime.'

So straight from the horse's mouth. Builders should not be using gypsum over lime, yet this happens every day in every corner of Wales. Why is this happening?

One section (the manufacturing element) of the construction industry says do one thing, yet another (the installation element) does the complete opposite. A certain blindness has appeared from both sides of the industry, both of whom are content to get paid for the wrong products to be used in our homes.

The right products to use are:
Lime plaster
Clay plaster

Guess that there are some people laughing all the way to the bank at our homes' expense!