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It begins with a spot on the wall.
I’m eating dinner with my wife when I notice a white speck on our red dining room walls near the wooden baseboard molding around the floor. My wife and I are having cold left over pizza for dinner because we’re both tired from a long day at work and we want to spend the little time we have in the evening with our toddler son as he throws applesauce at our heads. But there’s this little spot, just a speck, on the wall. I bend down and scratch it with my fingernail.
A chip of paint falls to the floor. “Hmm…” I say, leaning forward to avoid a flying cheese-covered piece of macaroni. “I guess I’ll have to touch up the wall tonight.”
This one room studio cottage soon grew to a 437 room castle after the owner’s wife said she’d like “a little rack for my spices.”
My wife, never missing an opportunity to keep me busy and off the streets, says, “If you’re going to fix that spot you’ll probably need to touch up other spots to match it.”
My agenda for this evening revolves around drinking beer and making fun of people on the TV so I don’t really want to spend those precious few hours sitting on the floor painting baseboards. I try a clever excuse: “Those baseboards are fifty years old, they’ll need more than paint to look good.”
“So why don’t you replace the baseboards?” my wife asks. D’oh! This is getting worse, not better.
“Because if I replace the baseboards I’ll first have to update all the trim around the doorways to know how short or long to cut the baseboards.”
“Why can’t you do the trim and then the baseboards?” she asks.
“I can’t do the trim because we’ve already planned to widen this doorway into the kitchen sometime. There’s not point in putting the trim up if I’m just going to take it down a little while later,” I answer. This is when I realize that I’ve completely lost this game. She has already analyzed this entire conversation and has easily figured out the thousands of possible ways it could go. Like Gary Kasparov playing chess with a chimpanzee, my wife has planned out the whole game before I even have a chance to unfold the board.
“What’s stopping you from widening the doorway now?” my wife asks innocently.
“Well, I’ll have to replace the kitchen cabinets before I widen the door because they are in the way.”
“So why don’t you replace the cabinets now?”
“Because I really need to fix up the slanting floors before I put new cabinets in.”
“What’s keeping you from working on the floors?” my wife asks.
I sigh. “I can’t get to the floors from the basement right now because the ceiling down there has that old sheet rock installed.”
“Can you remove it?”
“Sure, but it will make such a mess that I’d probably have to remodel the whole basement after I tear everything out.”
“Why can’t you do that?”
“Because I don’t have any place to put all the stuff we have in the basement now,” I answer with a sigh. I could mention to my wife that we really don’t have the ability to pay for any of these ideas, but I’m almost afraid she’ll reach under the table and bring out some sort of Carlton Sheets Easy Home Improvement Financing Course book and DVD set.
“What about that addition we keep talking about?” she asks.
“Yeah,” I say slowly. “I guess if we built that addition we could move the stuff from the basement into it while I worked down there.”
“Okay,” my wife responds with a smile. “So now we have a plan.”
I nod, removing a pea that is stuck in my hair. “We’re going to build that addition so that we can remodel the basement so that we can fix the slanted floor that will allow us to replace the kitchen cabinets that will make it easier to widen the doorway that we’re going to put trim around that will make the baseboards easier to replace so that I can paint that speck on the wall.”
“Sounds like a plan!” she says with a smile.
Damn.
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2 Responses to “Why You Should Never Discuss Home Improvement Projects with Your Wife”
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Sabrina says:
Aw, you crack me up
June 20th, 2008 at 10:28 pm -
jun says:
wow! it was so hilarious! can we possibly ask permission to reprint this article to our quarterly newsletter here in the Philippines? due credit will be given to your website. Pleeeaasssseee?