Home Improvement is on my mind lately. I have an old house and it needs some work—I can do some of it myself, but I will have to pay professionals to do the things I cannot do. Looking at what the previous owners did, I have these words of advice: don’t cheap out when you do a home improvement project OR when you revise your novel.
I love to watch Reality TV where they flip houses, decorate houses, or renovate older homes. I basically love home improvement and gardening shows. There used to be a show called Trading Spaces where the owners of one house would trade spaces with another set of owners. (The original was a British show called Trading Rooms.) Each team had a decorator and a weekend to redo a specific space in their neighbor’s house. True confession, I watched this sometimes because the likelihood of spectacular failure was pretty high. Sometimes the finished product was sort of okay, but everything was done on the cheap, with only a couple of days, so the paint sometimes looked crummy, because they didn’t have time to sand and prime the cabinets. Sometimes they chose finishes that they could do in the time they had, not because they looked good. The furniture was always cheap and they used stuff that they would try to recover themselves, which might be okay for a bit, but it probably isn’t going to hold up. Watching this show, I learned how not to do home improvement.
Contrast this with a show like Restoring Galveston, where a professional team renovate a whole house with an eye toward quality work, historical accuracy (sometimes), and a finished product that will stand the test of time. They never finish in a weekend. The timeline is usually weeks or occasionally months. They aren’t rushing it. If something doesn’t work, they go back and fix it. The home improvement isn’t a hastily applied bandaid, it is a job well done.
Is your revision strategy more like Trading Spaces or Restoring Galveston? Would you be willing to consider taking your time and getting professional help?