Dave, I will guess you hadn't a clue what I meant by drywall edge depressions and leave it at that. Thanks to the person mentioning the ceiling paper with paper underlayment. Hubby and I were discussing just that very thing, and the pressed tin look, as well. And the person suggesting the foam baseboard: that is the sort of thing I was looking for but any foam baseboard I had found so far was not the same side to side. It would have a square edge on one side and a curved or carved edge on the other. Thank you for the thoughtful suggestion. To the other help (less) responders who cannot apparently see outside of their box at all, best wishes to you and your 'properly' finished houses. No one will ever embarrass you by calling you creative. Aren't you glad? You want fries with that? Another project where I wanted a decorative post, I went to a local lumberyard (not Big Box) and discovered appearance grade cedar. It is for outside decks, but I loved it (and it's relatively light weight) so the ceiling problem has been fixed with appearance grade cedar 1X4's, precise angle cut with compound miter saw and glued where they join one another. Put up with adhesive and air finish nailer. I liked the post we did so much, stained the color of our floors, that I stained the cedar boards rather than paint them the ceiling color. Do they look like beams? No. They look like I wanted my ceiling trimmed in stained cedar. I like it. Goes well with my wood floors which are FACE NAILED PINE BOARDS, stained fairly dark. Everyone thought I was nuts to want that floor, too, but I had seen it done twice on HGTV and now I get compliments on the floor all the time, especially when I tell them the living room, dining room and master bedroom IN TOTAL cost me $600 (and a lot of sweat equity). A lot has changed in 4 years and I don't think I could spend all those hours sitting on the floor now, pounding nails, and on my knees wiping on stain and 3 coats poly. But I am glad my floors are not conventional or (eek!) laminate. Unprofessional? Unconventional? You betcha. Mortgage free though.

Blufish, The helpful part of it is that the house has a character and nature all its own, even if it isn't particuarly appealing to most people. Without massive amounts of money it's never going to be anything other than what it now is - a modular home. Essentially, Kennebunk said the same thing I said -- you can't make it an "old" house without major rebuilding, and major amounts of money. It would, in the long run, probably be a lot cheaper to either remove the existing place and build a new "old looking" home on the current site, or move. The Roanoke area of Virginia has a plethora of homes that are authenticly old, and likely about the same price as what the original poster would have to spend wrapping the current house in a cacoon of "old," combined with the current mortgage. I live in Northern Virginia, and over the past few years I've seen many people attempt to take homes from one period and magically transform them into homes from some other period. Uniformly they don't look right, they cost a ferocious amount of money, and the owners find themselves living a construction zone for months or years. But, just so that I'm "helpful," I'll offer this advice if the owner wants to proceed with this project. 1. Repitch the roof and put in two or three dormers. 2. Clad the exterior in brick, or wood clapboards. 3. Install larger windows. This is perhaps the most probelematic issue of all. Modular homes generally follow very tight design parameters, and changing the window openings will likely require major reconstruction of the entire front wall -- not just a new header. At that point, it's time to call in an architect. 4. Put a deep front porch on it the whole way across the front and around the side. Congratulations. You've just recreated this: A deep south style plantation style cottage of the kind that is more at home in coastal Georgia or Louisiana, but certainly not at home in south west Virginia. At its heart, though, it's still a modular home with all of that system's inherent strengths AND weaknesses.

I have officially geeked out about this plant. I love Lacy Phacelia. Its my new favorite rose companion. It's pretty isn't it? And it's already attracted so many hoverflies that they aren't just eating aphids...they are making babies and the larvae are eating aphids far away on other plants that aren't around the Lacy Phacelia! Diane and Natasha here's a photo showing the Lacy Phacelia in pots, but you can see that Corsican mint I was talking about in the background around the border of the pots. It's a groundcover like pennyroyal, but it likes part to full shade. I have it in pots around my berries. I also have a little "lawn" of it in the front yard near the shade of a redwood. So when it starts to grow too far out from the edge of the pots I just divide it and put it in the "lawn." Side note, that onion about to flower on the left came from food scraps of store bought organic green onions that I planted. How cool is that?

I think that any kind of 'treatment' you give them will just draw further attention to them. They're not really ugly. I think you will find that when you repaint them and the ceiling -- and be sure to keep them clean -- they won't bother you.