Before I met David, my love of remodeling was mostly limited to reading renovation stories in Better Homes or watching This Old House. I surfed the web and bookmarked photos that I lovingly called “house porn.”

I paid attention to lighting and color. I liked shapes–especially symmetry and bold, straight lines.

I rarely noticed stuff like orange peel or mudcaps. These were details that I had never had to quibble over, so I had no understanding of their importance in creating an overall ambience.

When we sat down and created the materials list in December, David and I got down to business noting all the specifics. It wasn’t just about paint color or light fixture model numbers. David had spent many, many hours redoing the house before the remodel, and there were details he had painstakingly noted back then. Covebase. Dimmer switches. The devil, I tell you, is in those details.

In our backyard is a sea of trim that was specially cut to match the odd yet original trim of our home. The fact that we even have trim is a big deal to me (as someone who lived in homes and apartments built post-1980 for many years–those houses don’t have moulding or mudcaps!), but I can’t say I ever noticed the specific groove or cut.

Unfortunately, once someone like David points out the trim to a gal like me, I can’t stop noticing it. Suddenly, everywhere I go I look at the trim. Is it strange like ours, caught between the plain s-grooves of the 1940′s and the modernist zigzag of the 1950′s? How muddled in glops of paint has the pattern become over the years? Is it repeated under the windowsills as well as on the baseboards?

When you walk through our home in a few months at our highly-anticipated open house, take a gander at the trim which, at the present moment, sits tanning in the backyard, waiting for the varnish on the floors to dry. The upstairs bathrooms might not have mudcaps, but the trim will rock your world.