They used brown everywhere because all the smoking would have eventually made it brown anyway. If they start there they could pretend nothing was wrong.
I recently bought a house that had been previously occupied by smokers. During renovation I had something happen that I’ve never seen before or even heard of. I tried repainting one of the walls without any prep and it seemed like the paint went on fine even a couple of hours later, but when I came back the next morning the paint had all flowed down off the walls onto the floor. As best I can tell, the nicotine and tar on the walls penetrated the partially-dried paint like a solvent and re-liquified it. Fortunately, just wiping the walls down with mineral spirits before painting fixed the problem.
When my aunt was alive and chain smoking her life away, we hesitantly visited wearing our oldest clothes that could be disposed of. There was no opening windows or anything like that, you just sat with your eyes watering and endured for an hour, during which she’d have smoked 7 cigarettes. Finally my eye started to swell from the smoke because I’m so sensitive to it, and my aunt noticed and got mad I hadn’t told her.
In the meantime my ex wandered through to use the bathroom, but he touched one wall and it was dripping nicotine and tar. What an awful habit. I lived through the 70s and 80s, where everyone smoked everywhere all of the time, and there’s nothing like riding with your parents in the car with the windows rolled up and them lighting a fresh one every ten minutes or so.
I’m a school bus driver now and about half of my coworkers smoke. It’s just fucking revolting because they always stink of that shit.
I know of someone who has seizures, and recently gave themselves a stay in the burn unit because they lit a cigarette after a seizure when they were postictal (meaning they are recovering from the seizure but still have no awareness). That was bad news bears as my friend likes to say. Just the risk of falling asleep with a lit cigarette would be enough to keep me from it, not to mention the way you stink, the cost, the way people avoid you, and the inevitable damage to your health. You can have quit cigarettes decades beforehand, and still end up with emphysema.
But just plain stinking would be enough for me! Ugh that’s awful for you.
I’ve had that happen with trying to paint oil-stained (as a finish, not like motor oil or something) wood with interior latex. It really doesn’t like this and will let the oil bleed through, cure improperly, anything but go on and look like fresh paint. My guess is the cigarette tars/oils on the walls did the same thing. I read up on this (was years ago) and I think there’s products designed for this (maybe a oil/latex interface primer of some kind). Or you just clean really hard, or use oil-based paint.
use oil-based paint
Oh dear god no. I’d rather have a root canal without anesthetic.
I don’t blame you. Stuff is terrible.
Yep my grandmother, and parents had all that shit. And everyone smoked. It was no surprise of 15 years of second hand smoke if I didn’t become a smoker too. Now 2025 we are all non smokers. Except for my mother she refuses to give it up.
I was told that the brown and puke green of the 70s were the result of backlash the bright hippie colors of the 60s. Dirty, earthly colors were more “natural” and “organic”. There’s probably truth to both
Idk, this has more personality to it than the beige nightmare a lot of folks live in. Even if that personality smells like stale cigarettes and Cutty Sark.
Apparently Cutty Sark is a whiskey, which presumably is what you meant, but the first DDG result is a British naval ship which … Also kinda makes sense?
Many liquor brands have a sailor/pirate theme. I never saw the appeal personally, but I guess it just plays off the stale “sailors drink a lot, amirite?” meme.
Very classy back in the day, très chic.
I cannot decide whether I’d call my parents classy. I don’t think they were deficient in that manner but I’m not sure whether they had a lot, either.
Also: Spiders. Spider god damned everywhere.
I’m fine with that. Made it a point over the last 30 years to get used to looking at them. I let 'em run the house. Figure if there’s enough food for a predator, best let them work for me.
Funny note: My Filipino wife is disappointed we don’t have house lizards. Aside from their obvious use, apparently they’re lucky.
The were saving all the pea soup green, salmon pink and sunflower yellow for the kitchen and bathrroms.
Cozy as all hell though. Better than the drab gray cookie-cutter-prison aesthetic for sure.
Bring back carpet, earth tones, and separated rooms please 😭 I want a good hidey hole to curl up in.
Cozy but hard as hell to clean. The patterns are meant to make that not particularly obvious until it gets really bad, but if dust is a health concern it gets to be a bit much.
My new home was built in the 50s and the biggest take away was “whoa, all the rooms are separate!” It’s glorious.
Never thought of that! I’m on my PC in the living room, wife is eating behind me at the kitchen table, which surprisingly enough, is in the kitchen. House dob: 2018 Total walls: 4
In the home I grew up in (dob: 1956), those were three separate rooms.
No, we must open-concept everything! That way, when people come over, you have to clean one giant room (instead of just whatever small rooms people are likely to be in.)
I wish I could just tidy up the living room without needing to tidy up the kitchen and the computer room, but with my apartment floor plan the only inside doors I have are for the bedroom and the bathroom. So all the excess crap I have no space for gets shoved into the bedroom, every time.
I’m good with bringing back all of it. Except carpet. Carpet needs stay away.
I used to live in a house that had multiple layers of carpet … in the bathroom. It was somehow even more disgusting than you would imagine.
Having one room like this is enough tbh. I love my concrete walls and ceramic tile.
I can smell this picture. Mildew, thousands of cigarettes, and whatever gas-soaked disaster grandpa has on his basement workbench around the corner. It’s the same era that brought us matching ceramic ash-trays for the coffee table, and bi-centennial themed kitsch like pewter minutemen that are actually cigarette lighters in disguise.
These colours were chosen specifically so we wouldn’t notice the nicotine coating everything.
Meanwhile millennial having everything greyscale, definitely not going to be a sign of the times lol
Don’t you talk shit about my grayscale. I got a gray cat to match and he blends perfectly into the couch, thank you.
As a guy who grew up in the 70s - this looks perfect. I’ll take it
Just roll in some labatts stubbies and shitty weed oil in a beer cap and we’re locked in for life
I recently bought a house that had used that ‘70s paneling as a sort of wainscoting in the kitchen; the panels had been cut to 4’ and applied in various ways (everything except just fucking nails) around the base of the walls. It had been painted white so it wasn’t quite as hideous as its original state and I didn’t feel like replacing it all, but I did have to repair one section of it that had been badly water-damaged. I was surprised to find that Lowe’s still has that shit in stock so I bought a piece of it and brought it home … and discovered that it wasn’t really like the original stuff. It looked the same but the grooves between the alleged “boards” were not recessed, they were just printed on the surface, so once it was painted it would have just looked like flat board. So I ended up having to rip that shit into fake planks and nail them up separately with small grooves between them. All that work just to simulate '70s hideousness.
Thank god there was no shag carpet in that house.
are you talking about bead board? I’m surprised that the blue store doesn’t have that. the orange store does.
No, I’m talking about the '70s faux-wood paneling, like what’s in the picture on this post. Nobody makes it any more.
I kinda like it, feels cozy :)
Same! Its comfy, natural and “worn in” much better than empty gray or beige
Looks cozy af
That first step is a doozy.
“And the brown and the beige and the brown and the beige and the brown!”
This was my family room.
I remember looking at estate agent photos of my parents home when they first bought it back in the 1980s. It looked very much like this. I remember when I was very young they had a carpet with a similar sort of dead plant motif, I remember crawling along and following the plant stems.
That’s just how everybody seemed to decorate things back then, people used to wear a lot of brown as well. Perhaps we all depressed or something
You got a remember, back then smoking inside was a normal thing to do. There is a color pallet that nicotine stains just sink into without notice. This picture is a prime example of said color pallet.
Right, my first reaction was “I can smell this picture.”
My parents had the exact same upholstery as that couch in the living room growing up.
90% of my furniture comes from them, at least it’s repairable and high quality.
A million times better than what the average person buys nowadays
