We've been living in the house for nearly three months now, and it's been quite an experience. First of all, houses in the Netherlands are almost always made from concrete. This is quite nice from a natural disaster (or air raid) perspective, but a little annoying for basic changes such as replacing wallpaper with paint.
There's a very good reason wallpaper is so popular in Europe. Have you ever tried painting concrete walls? We have. First you have to get rid of the wallpaper. Fortunately for me, my fiance and his parents did 90% of that before I arrived. It was peach wallpaper. Where there was painted trim, it was also peach. And the entry hallway was dark peach. There were about 6 layers of the wallpaper, adding to the fun.
One reason wallpaper is so popular is that it's addictive. Once it's up, you don't want to take it down. If you want a different color or design or it's in bad shape, the easiest solution is to throw up (BARF?) a new layer on top of the old. Wallpaper isn't just for little old ladies here. Removing wallpaper varies in difficulty depending on how well it was glued, how long ago it was glued, and how damp it's gotten. Wide swaths may come off easily, but then you get to the edges and need a moderately abrasive sponge and a thin-bladed scrapey thing. The 10% or so I scraped was enough to reaffirm my hatred of wallpaper.
Once the wallpaper is gone, there's a new problem: concrete walls have holes. Lots of small holes. A lot of them are too big to be filled or covered by a layer or two of paint. So we did some research and discovered that stucco is the recommended way to treat concrete walls. We bought the materials, mixed the first batch, and got a coarse yet watery mixture that was impossible to apply thickly enough. We reread the directions and realized the instructions on the bag failed to use its own calculations when mixing the entire bag with water. We recalculated and started over. After a week or so of attempts and patching and watching instructional youtube videos, we finally had a single wall in our living room stuccoed to our satisfaction. And swore to never stucco again.
The best way to deal with holey concrete is with a hole filler (muur vuller: http://www.stixkoopjesmarkt.nl/components/com_virtuemart/shop_image/product/Alabastine_muurv_4ad0d7b20fbcb.jpg ), the sort that comes in a little cardboard box to be mixed with water and scraped on. Basically we coated the remaining walls in this, which was Not Fun but still Way More Fun Than Stucco. Some walls got primed afterward and some didn't. It didn't seem to make much difference in the end result.
Even after hole-filling or stuccoing, the concrete wall is still somewhat irregular. So instead of using high gloss paint (or satin finish), there's a wonderful product called textured paint (structuurverf). It's vaguely reminiscent of popcorn ceilings, but less extreme. It's thicker than regular paint and is slopped on the walls with specific paint brushes than rolled with yellow plastic spongey rollers if you want a normal texture. There's other rollers for the "sandpaper" and "mountain range" textures, if you swing that way. The result is pretty normal looking walls with well-concealed flaws. It can't really be washed, but debris can be brushed off with a hand broom. It can also be covered with regular paint, which is useful if you want to get rid of the sandpaper texture, or apply a new coat of paint that isn't as absurdly expensive as the first coat.
Another Grand Adventure was dealing with the electrical wiring. When people move out of houses in the Netherlands, they take the light fixtures with them. And the light bulbs. And sometimes even the flooring and kitchen appliances and kitchen cupboards. We survived the first two months with two 7 euro floor lamps. They were fugly.
None of the lights were grounded, or the electric wall sockets, so Jan rewired all of those. Wiring in concrete houses runs through the walls inside little PVC tubes from the outlet to the electrical box in a small closet. To add newfangled things like grounding, you pull out all the wires but one, attach the new wires to the old wire, and push and pull the old wire until it's completely out of the tube and the new wires are in the tube. Then hook it all up and repeat 20 times. But it's not so simple as that. Electric outlet wires are usually routed through light outlets and light switches, which creates all sorts of lovely 90 degree angles that bundles of wires just don't like to squeeze through.
While grounding the larger bedroom, we discovered the junction point was in the bathroom light. ?!?. It had the worst angle yet, and after the wires got stuck and detached from the guide wire the first time, we resorted to using the flexible metal snake-like thing to pull the wires through. Except it still got stuck, even with all of Jan's weight on it and 90% of mine (about 400 pounds combined, or 200 kg), and the main copper wire finally broke where it had been very securely attached to the snake. I managed to get it a few centimeters farther by barely grabbing the tip of a wire with a pair of pliers and hanging from the ceiling by them while squeezing for dear life. I am not exaggerating. Then we were able to grab individual wires and pull them far enough to hook up to the grounding and other wires.
After that rather awesome upper body workout, we moved onto easy things, like wiring the entire house for fiber optic internet that was currently being installed in the neighborhood :-) We replaced the telephone lines in the living room and bedrooms with high speed networking cable, and added a second internet outlet in the living room so we wouldn't have to run the cabling halfway around the room. Seriously, who decided to put the cable outlet in the dumbest possible corner when building the house? Jan had to buy a hammer drill for this project, which seems to rate pretty highly on the list of cool man toys. Basically it's a drill wot spins but also uses a hammering motion to get through concrete. A pretty essential tool in any concrete abode.
He had to venture into the crawl space for this - a board under the nasty outdoor carpetting in the entryway opens up into a 2 foot high space lined with dirt, dead spiders, and some interesting tools that had been rotting down there for 20 years. Of course, prior owners had superglued this board to the floor (?!?), and it had to be destroyed and replaced. Jan drilled a hole into the utility closet, then into the floor near the wall where the outlet should be. Drilling up into the living room wall was not an option, even at a pretty steep angle. But at least the outlet ended up in a great location, directly under the TV cupboard, and invisible with the cupboard over it. Then he hooked up new PVC tubes down there, attaching them to the wall with his handy hammer drill and plugs designed just for the purpose of holding those tubes in place.
Unfortunately, the former owners didn't take the upstairs carpet with them. Or the carpet on the stairs. The bedroom carpet had been replaced at some point, but not the upper hallway or stairs, so in addition to the older carpet being very nasty, there were large strips of wood dividing the bedrooms from the hallway. We pulled out all of the carpet and glued down vinyl in the laundry room, and got bamboo hardwood installed in the bedrooms and upper hallway. White floor trim replaced the nasty old stuff, both upstairs and downstairs, where it had looked like a lego project gone horribly wrong. Jan's dad, over the period of a couple months, completed the Great Stair Project, removing the carpet, scraping off the crud on the stairs, and painting it with several layers of white wood paint.
Last night we finally applied the half-circles of carpeting (bought in a package at the local Karwei hardware store) to the stairs, and everything remodel-ish is done and looking pretty awesome. The other thing the hammer drill is essential for is hanging pictures. That requires hammer drilling a hole, inserting a plug, screwing a screw into the plug, then hanging the picture. We also did this for the shelf over our bed, though since it was a wall added by prior owners, in ended up needing hollow wall plugs for four of the holes and wood screws for two of the holes. Typical :-P At least we didn't hit the Hidden Junction Box Of Doom while drilling there. We know there's one, because wires are running through it to an electrical outlet. We just don't know exactly where it is, and don't want to tear down the wall to find it. So one outlet remains eternally ungrounded.
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