This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with 32-year-old Pennsylvania resident Tyler Bouldin, who bought a house in rural Pennsylvania with his wife three years ago. The couple used to live 10 minutes outside of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, but now is 45 minutes from the nearest town. This essay has been edited for length and clarity.
We purchased the house three years ago at an auction after it had been owned by the state for like 10 years. I think everybody reacted to Covid quarantine in weird ways, and I impulse-bought a house for about $460,000.
We really wanted something that was kind of in the country, had a little more land, and a little bit of elbow room. We weren't necessarily looking for a renovation project or an old house.
It's about 6,000 square feet, six bedrooms, five bathrooms, and it sits on about five acres. We've been working on the house pretty much since we purchased it.
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I always say we're three years into a one year renovation. We were like, "OK, you know, we're gonna do this thing in a year." That is not how it's panned out.
We've been using artificial intelligence — specifically the RemodelAI app — for things like wallpaper and tile. I find it does a really good job if you're looking to overlay paint wallpaper, tile flooring — like you want to change either the color or the type of material that's on a surface.
We aren't working with an interior designer because we're too cheap. My wife mocks up the AI-generated design images in Photoshop, so it's saving us almost the entire cost of an interior designer.
For instance, we're about to begin refinishing all of our floors, and historic flooring is really expensive. There's a book of like 100 wood stains, but what they actually look like in practice is kind of hard to picture without testing it out on the floor. Once you stain it, it is what it is.
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Say there's a room, and I want to see a light-colored floor, or dark-colored floor, or different shades. We tried to do that with Photoshop. My wife's a designer, so she would try to mock something up, but that's super time-consuming.
By using AI on a lot of the rooms throughout the house, we kind of narrowed it down to maybe a couple of general looks. We would try to replicate what we had in our heads and get a sense of what that may look like.
I think it's easy to assume that if you give AI a prompt, it's going to deliver something that is exactly the same or better than what a person will do. In most cases it won't.
The value proposition for me is that I can do like 50 prompts back-to-back and get immediate results that are a good starting point for what the finished product could be.
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Unlike text generators like ChatGPT, it matters more if the program suggests an impractical design for the home. If you're designing a room with AI and it adds a Roman pillar where there's not currently a Roman pillar, it's like, "We're never going to do that." Like, that's literally impossible.
Using an app that kind of allows us to retouch individual parts of the room is really helpful. I find myself repeating different prompts until I get something that's close to what I'm looking for.
Then I'll take that and touch up the parts that maybe don't align exactly with with what I had in mind, or doesn't seem practical.
I was recently helping all my friends shop for their first house, and they've been looking at renovation projects.
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It was kind of cool to take the pictures from Zillow of some of these houses that were really outdated or, like, needing a ton of work and just run them through the app really quick.
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