DIY

I'm busy this week. This is a reprint of a 1996 Journal Times column:

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We need another bedroom and we’ve decided to build it in our basement. Like Americans everywhere who have too much imagination and not enough undesignated money (what’s that?), we are going to do it ourselves. This is where people who know us start laughing.  

It started in the halcyon days of our early marriage. My husband had fond memories of the tropical fish he’d had as a boy. I pointed out to him that anyone with warm memories of fish has a feeble imagination. He ignored me and went out to buy a tank and all the paraphernalia one needs to maintain fish. After he set everything up, I had to admit the fish were rather pretty in a mindless kind of way. He reminded me that he already had a wife, uncomplicated was a welcome break. 

We went to bed. An hour later we woke up to a gentle splashing sound. Our old and listless cat had become quite listful and was busy fishing.               

We rescued the fish that were salvageable. The next day my husband priced aquarium covers at the fish store. He said that at twenty dollars, they were too expensive. So he went to the lumber yard, bought twenty dollars’ worth of materials and came home to construct the first DIY project of what was to become a very long marriage.              

The effect was unique. That was what the people who didn’t want to offend us said. Others (we had friends who were architects) bowled over laughing. It looked like a small, carefully sanded, stained, and polyurethaned ski jump. Under the high end was a light bulb. Sandwiched between the light bulb and the water was a cookie cooling rack to keep the cat from snaking his arm in for late night snacks. Luckily we have a sense of humor and very thick egos. We need them for the life we keep pounding together.

A few years later we got a decent pet, our dog. We needed a cage for him to sleep in at night and in which to travel when we went places. Once again, commercial cages cost about seventy dollars, so we bought fifty dollars’ worth of two by fours and hurricane fencing and we were off.              

The completed cage was four feet long, three feet wide, three feet tall and weighed close to a hundred pounds. We attached suitcase handles to either end of it. The only way we could move it was for each of us to get on an end and strain together.               

It was so big that when we wanted to put it in our car we had to take the back seat out first. In a fit of whimsy, we bought steel signs and wired them to the side of the cage. One said to Keep Out and the other warned to Beware of Dog. If you didn’t see the collie puppy inside, it was quite impressive.

We kept it in the corner of our kitchen. Once a meter man came to check the meter, stopped when he saw the cage, backed off, and asked in a low voice, “What’s that for?”             

My sister-in-law, who happened to be visiting that morning, was no slouch at wicked humor. Lindy turned to him and remarked, “Oh, that’s where we put the last meter reader.”             

He was out of there in record time.               

There have been a lot of projects in the years between then and now. For the record, we refinished a kitchen and it was a knock-out. We’ve learned a lot. We even know enough to hire professionals from time to time. But we still have our lingering reputation.                                    

So, to those who are laughing and shaking your heads, may we remind you of what Noah’s neighbors must have thought when he built the Ark.