Flappy Drift

Every painted door, skirting and cornice in an old house holds its decorating history ⏳ in the paint on its surface. Flappy Drift reads that history from a shallow crater sanded through the paint with a ball burr. Take a photo 📸 of the crater or pick one from your library 📚, set the scale with two pins on a rule, tap 👆 the grey card to balance the colour, then fit a ring handle to each band from the rim inwards. From the burr diameter and the ring radii Flappy Drift works out how thick each layer is, in microns or mils, reads its colour and compares it with a library of 36 historic colours, each tied to its pigment, its binder and the years it was in use. A dark hairline between two rings is marked as a dirt line, the break between two campaigns; a yellowed ring is marked as varnish. If you have no photo yet, a practice crater lets you try the whole read first. Each reading is saved to a site 🏗️, and sites are grouped by room in a sample schedule 🗓️: dado rail, plaster wall, baluster, sash window, railing. The chart 📊 sets every site side by side as a column of layers drawn to scale. Flappy Drift then lines the columns up into decoration schemes, using the dirt lines as anchors, so layer four on the dado and layer six on the shutter show up as the same Brunswick green campaign. You can move any layer to another scheme by hand and run the alignment again, and the scheme timeline 🕒 places each campaign on an era axis. The reference shelf covers the twelve pigments and seven binders behind the colour library 📚, from lead white and yellow ochre to limewash, oil-bound distemper and alkyd gloss. Pin a colour and it joins the chart 📊 legend. Flappy Drift works entirely on the phone 📱, needs no sign-in, and keeps the survey, its sites and their readings on the device, where a photo 📸 can be removed or replaced at any time.