The Walden Effect: Farming, simple living, permaculture, and invention.

In which I pretend not to be a perfectionist

Demolition

The trickiest post of remodeling (for me at least) is deciding how much of a perfectionist to be. For example, in the bedroom there's a lot of water damage in the ceiling tiles from a leak that came before our time. I'm sure the pros would have told us to rip the panels out and replace them...but instead I just laid down a coat of primer and then a coat of paint.

Primer over wood paneling

Similarly, I decided not to deal with the indented lines of the wood paneling and even avoided spackling over nail holes. This room will see low use during daylight hours and will generally be viewed under low light, so less disruption of my sleep during remodel trumps polished perfection. Plus, it lets me get to the fun part faster --- painting!



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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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Little changes like painting can really brighten up not only a home but ourselves during the winter. Your home is looking great!
Comment by Pam Kaufman Sun Jan 15 10:40:03 2017

We painted the water damaged ceiling of our 1976 singlewide moble and it looked really good. My husband is a painter and he did what you plan to do. He used a primer and then paint. It lasted for the 20 tears that we lived in our moble.

We painted the panaled walls of the bathroom. The lines on the walls gave the room character.

Comment by mona Sun Jan 15 14:47:21 2017





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