I think that a lot of you will be able to relate to parts of this story. It has to do with adding on to your house. You feel cramped, you've got no place to put all the stuff you never use but can't throw away. You want a change but are afraid to pack up and move out to the country or to Mexico. The kids or kid in our case are growing up, the dog or dogs in our case our throwing up and need more space to do it in and so you put on an addition. Sounds like a great idea, ends up being pure hell. I have a feeling that the only thing independent contractors are working hard at is to surpass the beloved status of child pornographers, lawyers and politicians and may get there yet if they keep (not) working at it. We found a guy who told my wife he loved working on old houses and that's why he had so low a bid. She took him at his word partly because we had a limited amount of money and mainly because she likes to believe in people. Now that is also limited.

To cut to the chase and self- degrading part of the story, lets just say we ended up firing him (after giving him a good chunk of money) because he had not shown up for many months after having torn down the back of our house. You see winter was coming. Minnesota winter was coming which means it can be 70 degrees one day and 10 below with a foot of snow the next. The only other thing he had or his 'crew' had done in four months was put on a 'new' roof that leaked twice as much as the old one. He then put a lien on our house and we spent a couple years fighting that, couldn't re-finance and in the meantime went into total credit card debt finishing up the project with the help of some 'former' friends who put on another bad roof, drank about a case of beer while they worked, ate our food, slept here and there in our house and took off without finishing every thing we paid them for. The good news is we did end up with more space.

Most of the work was done on the upstairs where we ended up with two high vaulted ceiling rooms. One, in the new part of house was done by the second (former friend) contractors (?) before they took off, the other which we are most proud of was done in the old part of the house by ourselves and friends who still are friends. That room is now my studio and has all my recording stuff and instruments and such and is so different from what it was. We took out the ceiling, a wall (I was swimming in insulation.) and it now has a cool little loft at one end and a nice octagon window in the front.

For those of you who have kept up with our stories you must be wondering what my contribution could have been. I followed orders, carried things around, held things, measured things then measured them again then let someone else measure them and actually did some things right though I couldn't explain how, what or why now. I also learned how to use some tools including a nail gun (if your shaking your head in horror, you've got good reason).

Ok, friends, real friends are a big part of this story, one guy who had known my wife many years back and came new into both of our lives was the main one who saved us during the earlier fiascos by finishing things up, working hard, for cheap. He is also the one responsible for my new studio room because he said, "Tear down the ceiling" and then proceeded to disappear for weeks and months at a time showing up periodically to help when we were truly stuck. Another friend of mine from high school days, Larry Anderson, came down for a couple days to help with the sheet rocking. He does this sort of work for a living and lives a couple hours north of us. He's very tall which came in handy for putting sheet rock up at twenty feet. My brother who's not very tall came by one of the days Larry was there, he knows a little more than I do about this kind of stuff, which means not very much. Yes, that's right, there were three of us one named Larry you can take it from there.

One day when it was just Larry and I, we had placed a ladder on one of the wood beams that went across for the old ceiling (our house 'and the beam' is 110 years old.) We were putting up sheet rock or measuring for it or something when the beam broke and we both went down fast and it just so happened that on my end there was some kind of saw or big tool that I was falling towards but I kind of jumped out of the way an landed almost on my feet. The day my brother was over we were all on ladders placed in different locations so we could hold up a big piece of sheetrock and someone didn't have a good grip on their end and we all went down. When Larry wasn't there and we put sheetrock up by our selves we put in on backwards crooked and inside out (is that possible)?

You have to remember that this is all taking place after the 'I Married An Idiot' website was already up and running so it was all future fodder for the site. It's weird how that happens I mean there's a point where you think that you can't do anything more idiotic than you've done before, that it's all in the past and now we have this site and we'll have to make stuff up. But then it happens. You're never ready for it when it does, if you were you'd be afraid to do anything. I know your wondering about the nail gun; it was a big one, which I used a lot. Yes, it did go off one time when I didn't want it to, well, more than once but only once when my hand was somewhat in the way, it just grazed my palm but scared the crap out of me. On another occasion I was using a staple gun and held that the wrong way (hey, I had two options) and stapled myself dead on. On another day when my stepfather was over helping with the electrical, I stuck my hand in the fuse box in an empty slot thinking (not) that nothing could happen since there was no fuse in there. I got the shock of my life almost as big a shock as my wife would have got if none of the above had happened.

I'm writing this story from my new studio just about under the place where Larry and I fell and Larry, my Curly-haired bother and I crumbled together and I can almost see it and it's all worth it and if my wife heard me say that she'd say, "You idiot". And that's worth it too.

Idiots Unite. Stand Proud