If You Buy Your Wife A House...

By Becky Frump Mamaroff

If you buy your wife a house,

she’s going to want to renovate it.

Unwittingly, you will offer to do whatever you can to help.

When she’s finished with her plans, she’ll have lists of tasks for you to do.

Lots of tasks.

Lots and lots and lots of tasks.

And when you finish those, she’ll ask you to do yet one more thing.

You’ll have to go to Lowe’s to get more paint.

She’ll want to go with you.

On the way there, she’ll remember how she wanted to decorate the guest bedroom, and will decide the room needs a ceiling fan.

While she’s in the fan department, she’ll decide that all the bedrooms need matching fans.

And when you arrive back at the house, she’ll ask your ‘handy’ friend Steve to install them all.

And then she’ll decide that all the builder’s standard gold light fixtures have got to go, and so she’ll pick out new brushed nickel light fixtures for around the house.

Which she’ll ask her husband to install, because his ‘handy’ friend Steve wisely taught him how to install them (the whole ‘teach a man to fish, he’ll eat for a lifetime’ principle).

While you’re installing the over-the-kitchen sink light, your wife will decide that the cabinets on either side need a little more…substance.

And so she’ll ask for an oak plank.

Which will require a couple unearthing the power tools from the stacks of boxes in the garage to saw, rout and drill holes.

And when she’s done with staining that plank to match the cabinets, she’ll ask you to install it.

But it can’t be done until the window treatments are up.

Instead, she'll ask you to help her trim the sliding doors with matching molding.

She will then ask you to help her hang the drapery rod.

And then the drapes.

And you will rue the day you ever bought that house, because the list of projects will seem unending, and you can't even sit on your sofas in the living room, because you can't find them behind the stacks of boxes of stuff that were moved out of the guest room to get it ready to be painted.

You will notice that one project always depends on another.

And every single project entails a trip to Lowe’s for some more hardware or other supplies.

Which she’ll ask you to ‘pick up’ on your way home from work.

When you bring it home, she’ll remember there was one other thing she needed, and will make a trip there herself while you paint the guest room.

The smell of the paint that evening will be overwhelmingly strong, and will require the bottom of the door to the room to be sealed off and all the bedroom doors at the other end of the house shut for the night if the occupants are to get any sleep at all without mom flipping out about her infuriating asthmatic condition.

And then she will want to get the trim in that room cut and installed right away because the room doubles as her studio, and she will need to begin working in there as soon as it airs out if she’s to ever get her Christmas projects underway.

Which will require borrowing an air compressor from one friend, and a nail gun from another…and another trip to Lowe’s for the proper length of nails for the overly thick trim.

And after it’s installed, she’ll want it painted right away, but that will have to wait because you don't want to tape off fresh paint.

So she will turn her attention to installing the trim throughout the living area (so that all the trim painting can be done in the same window of time while she camps out at your mom's house) but when she goes to make the measurements for the cuts, she’ll realize that the kitchen cabinet project must be finished first.

Which requires more sawing, staining and installing.

Which will require another trip to Lowe’s, whereby she will ask for even more money.

And chances are…if you give her the money, she’ll find yet another project for you to do.

You’ve been a real trouper, Jeff. Without you, we would have no beautiful new house and my Repressed Inner Decorator dreams would never have come true.

YOU DA MAN!

Love, your slightly crazed but totally jazzed-about-her-new-home wife.