It’s after 9 p.m. at the farm, and my legs and back are shot, there is chaos and exhaustion in our house, but Maria and I are bearing down on our dining room wall restoration project. For most of the night we split it up this way, I sprayed and scraped, and she spackled and painted. It takes about five applications of warm water laced with fabric softener to get the wallpaper soft enough to scrape.

I think I got a blister from pumping softener into the spray bottle, but it was also fun to do this with Maria, two obsessives unable to stop without the help of the other. We were accompanied by Aretha Franklin, Bonnie Raitt and Bob Dylan, three good companions. (Lorde is my cardiac exercise companion, and sometimes, Itzhak Perlman.)

For the vast majority of my life, I hired people to do this sort of thing, I knew even less about walls than I did about nature. I am happy that is changing. I can easily tell plaster from wallboard now, I look for second and third layers of wallpaper, common in old farmhouses, I know to scrape gently and carefully, not to push it but to keep applying the warm softener spray. I am pretty good at it now, and Maria follows through, doing the high spots and applying the plaster and paint. She knows how to do this stuff, she has restored many an old house.

She doesn’t love it, but is good at it. I am coming to love it, and we are great at it together. This is the last dingy room in our small farmhouse, we did my study and the living room. It will greatly brighten the downstairs, we might even eat at the dining room table instead of the living room when its finished. We are both exhausted, we will go to bed soon enough. Tomorrow, we take on the final wall, the one behind the wood stove.

That wall is tough, there was a lot of rain and water seepage there, and a huge safety screen for the wood stove. We will need help getting it down. But there are two days to go before the weekend ends, and we will be at it again early tomorrow. I love learning new things and doing new things and taking responsibility for our home, which we love.  There is nothing like putting your own blood and sweat into your home, and doing it together.

Our decision to heat the house mostly with two wood stoves has really paid off. The oil company came by last week to fill the tank, and it cost us $127, an 80 per cent reduction from last year at this time. We have figured out how to use the two stoves efficiently, even on the coldest days (we use the oil heater for about 30 minutes on especially cold days). We are learning how to live simply and efficiently every day, and we are committed to living in nature with animals as a focal point of our lives and my work.

The dining room wall project is just a day or two from being completed. My body squawks after so many hours of scraping and stretching, but it has held up well. Maria can go almost forever, then she just crashes and sleeps like the dead. This is a good kind of tired.