Until the Curtain Falls

Why 'Good Enough', Now, is Often Better than the 'Right' Thing Later

I live in a large, chalet-style home in upstate New York, about 30 miles west of Albany in the northern foothills of the Catskills. The home has SO MUCH light – most of the southern facing side of the home is glass – almost literally all of it.  I.e., I have over 24’ of sliding doors, and three of the bedrooms have 75-90% of their south walls as glass, as does the dining room. It is a gorgeous home and far beyond anything I ever thought I would live in, and the views are simply stunning. Because of all this glass and southern exposure, though it wasn’t designed as one, it acts quite well as a passive solar heated home. Now, I’ve studied passive solar construction a fair amount, and when I say not designed for passive I mean, if anything, it is over glazed (too much glass), there isn’t enough thermal mass (though it has far more than a typical home) to stabilize temps, and what dooms it is they angled the house about 12 degrees off true south to see the opposing ridgeline better to the southwest, meaning it doesn’t start solar gain until mid-morning and you BAKE in the afternoon/evening sun, August through September. Ah…. but those views! The main windows in the great room are low-conductive, gas-filled uber windows that still let in most of the UV heat, but the sliding doors are conventional. All in all, the home is remarkably efficient – I can heat its 3000 sq ft 80% with just a wood stove in the lower level (which is walk-out, with a… wait for it… *glass* front of course) with just 1.5 full cords of firewood a year, and sunny days still get the house into the mid-seventies with 25F outside temps, though indoor temps will fall 15F overnight (the other 20% is 200 gallons of propane a year, which also does cooking). The combination of modern, tight, insulated construction and solar gain are very nice.  

This rambling intro, while excessive, has a point… hang in there.  

The house is a dream 9 months of the year.  But those other three can get a bit rough.  For a month and a half in late summer, the house is uncoolable, as the lower angle sun of late summer shines in HARD from 4-9pm, rocketing the house up to 90F+ inside even if it's only 70F outside (upstate, ya’ll!).  And that is with the windows open (this would be better if I could open the screens in the sliding doors, but we also breed small dogs, and they ripped those out in the first 6 months and I haven’t replaced them yet). And then mid JanFeb the temps and cloudy days mean we cross the tipping point and the house starts losing far more energy than it gains in the windows. The dining room and the master bedroom never feel warm; the dining room has two of those sliders on both south and west walls, and the master has a slider to the master balcony deck and is the farthest from the woodstove. The master drops heat hard overnight, dipping into the 40s if the door is closed, and the dining room just sucks the heat out of you right out those doors in the winter, and is a scorching inferno in late summer (though I usually eat outdoors).  not a good design, but there are some simple things that can be done to improve it. 

One of which is a no brainer – namely: curtains. This is literally ancient technology – as long as we have had structures we’ve been putting up pelts, tapestries, etm. over walls, windows and doors to cut down on drafts and add insulation. This is known to me: my parents, having grown up in wood heated, 19th century farm houses in bitterly cold central Wisconsin were and are firm advocates of curtains, drawn nightly before bed and opened with the first coffee of the day as a ritual from Thanksgiving well into March.  

So… why, 2.5 years into the home, have I not installed… really ANY window coverings at all?   Complicated, but other than my wife and I (now separated) having some disagreement over the efficacy of curtains, the main issue was that I wanted to get the “perfect” curtains.  Insulating, heat-reflecting, multilayered, etc., that also looked nice. That is far too many qualifiers for them to be any accessible mix of easily attainable, affordable, or likely to be found in a color we could both agree to.  So we froze, and baked, by turns, for going on 3 winters.  Finally, after it became clear we wouldn’t be getting back together, I wanted to do *something* about the cold radiating in (I know that is not technically how the physics works). And I looked for a month for the Right Curtains and kept coming up blank – too expensive, available only overseas, wrong colors, etc. I was spinning, and Winter was setting in.  

So (finally!) I went online, found some cheapish, substantial-looking curtains at Target that would add to the décor and do at least *something*.  I found them for $18 a set, bought 2 in a red that looked ok-ish for the dining room and another in a slate gray for the master, found some OK looking inexpensive wrap-around flush-mount curtain rods and made the order.  All told, it was about $40 a door, and my son and I hung all three in under an hour. So simple.

And… so fucking effective. The first night it was REMARKABLY warmer in the dining room for dinner – like the kids and I commented on it. And that night, despite temps dropping to low single digits F and the howling wind of the advance front of the bomb cyclone, the master stayed warmer than it had the past week with nights in the 20s – and likely about 8F warmer than it would have in those temps, pre-curtains. The main house did the same, actually staying warmer than the night before despite a literal 20F difference in outdoor temps. And the house looks better with the added color to the rooms and the texture and line breaks framing the doors. It takes a decent amount to surprise me, and this was remarkable.  

2.5 years. For 30 months I had found reasons to not put them up – mostly because I wanted multilayer insulating reflective uber curtains. I am sure they would be better. I am not at all sure I would notice the difference that much, and given the 10-20x price difference, it would not have had an ROI in my lifetime, and I still can’t find a color of hem I like. Talking to the kids, I likened it to the difference between walking to Albany (30 miles) and getting a used car to make the trip.  It would go from a 10 hour trip to a 40 min trip. Now a newer luxury or EV car would be more comfortable, and maybe faster or more efficient, but the 95% of the gain was in going from no car to car, not from going from meh car to uber car.  

And this is true in so many areas of our lives.  Maybe this isn’t an issue for ya’ll, but me? Well, I can be rather… particular. I research. I compare. I dream. I test things out. I hem and I haw. I take forever to make a purchase. I may have 7 different garden forks, and yes goddammit I need them all! And in the meantime, the problem that I needed the thing for is still there, unsolved… because I am waiting for the perfect solve. I sit for weeks… months… years… in a too hot/too cold room thinking about the perfect curtain and occasionally researching them again only to be turned off again for whatever reason. The Perfect getting in the way of the Good. 

An article I read in the Atlantic earlier this year (as well as the separation in my marriage and the resulting therapy sessions to help me handle it) really helped me in this regard. The article, when I first read it, stressed the “good enough” life. I have the actual book on order, and maybe it will land differently in the full prose form, but the phrase “good enough” didn’t land well, even though the article certainly had an impact. To me the concept needed a slight rebranding.  “Good enough” has negative connotations for me, like it’s settling for something less, and that detracts from the fact that what you have chosen or have now is ample and should be satisfying while also saving you weeks, months, years of agonizing over the minutiae and perhaps unattainableness of Perfection. The unlock for me to be more at ease with the concept was to separate the two words. These curtains are “good”. And that is quite possibly “enough”. That separation was huge for me. It really helped me frame the philosophy of the matter in a much more palatable way. Clearly so, since I finally bought the gd curtains. They are Good curtains. And judging by the thermostat and the smile I get when I walk into the rooms and see them, they seem to be Enough.

This concept is hard and meaty – I will likely revisit it more at length once I read the book later this winter. We live in a time where we each, quite literally, carry damn near the sum total of all human knowledge and all the commerce of the world in our pockets at all times. We can be as particular as we want. The choices are almost infinite. And ….it’s slightly to moderately soul-crushing, depending on your bent. It doesn’t make us happier and in fact likely causes many of us rather a lot of anxiety, if not a ton of wasted effort.   

I waited 30 months to get these damn Target curtains. But …they made a huge difference in my day-to-day life.

They are Good.    

They are Enough.

-Rob

Light, windows and curtains that are Good. And Enough.

-Rob