If It Was Easy, They'd Call the Whole Damn Thing a Honeymoon

by Jenna McCarthy

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  If You Build It, There

  Will Be Many, Many

  Arguments

  If you want to sacrifice the admiration of many men for the criticism of one, go ahead, get married.

  • KATHARINE HEPBURN •

  Even if you’re not as ballsy (or naïve or stupid) as Joe and me and you don’t decide to buy a second house you can’t quite afford and completely gut and renovate it with money, time, and skills you don’t really have on national television (more about this later) so that all of the world can bask in your ballsy, naïve stupidity, chances are at some point in your marriage, you and your husband will attempt to assemble something together. It might be a Barbie Dream House for your daughter’s eighth birthday or a Ping-Pong table you splurged on in anticipation of your First Annual July Fourth Tequila, Taco, and Table Tennis Blowout, or maybe it will be a simple IKEA bookshelf comprising four particle-board pieces that “snap together in seconds, no tools required!” All I can say is, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

  You’ll go into your construction project pumped and prepared, having had the forethought to assemble several thousand tools plus a few rags, a handy tarp, the video camera for posterity, and of course a couple of cocktails. (The cocktails are crucial.) You will probably forget to check to see if the product packaging contained everything it promised that it did, but since screw A looks identical to screw B to you and you have no idea what a washer is in this context, you’ll figure it doesn’t matter so much anyway. You lay everything out neatly, in what feels to you like some sort of order, and the process begins.

  “Can you hand me an Allen wrench?” he asks.

  “What’s an Allen wrench?” you reply, surveying your temporary tool corral and looking for something that might resemble Alan Alda or Alan Greenspan or even Woody Allen.

  “The hex key,” he says.

  “The what?” you ask.

  “Allen wrench, hex key, it looks like a little L,” he replies impatiently.

  “Why didn’t you just say so?” you demand, handing him the stupid L, which looks nothing at all like an aging actoractivist or a bald economist or a screwball Jewish screenwriter/ director, for the record.

  “Okay, now I need the main body piece labeled number six,” he instructs.

  You scan the boards you’ve laid out smartly, but there is no number six.

  “There is no number six,” you inform him.

  “There has to be a number six,” he insists.

  “Well there isn’t,” you maintain with all of the confidence in the world, swallowing half of your vodka and cranberry. You have a college degree and once even worked as a math tutor and you’re pretty sure you can recognize the number six when you see it. Which you are positive you don’t.

  “It’s right there,” he barks, pointing at a piece of particle-board.

  “That’s not a six, that’s a ni—” You stop midword and mentally kick yourself. Why didn’t it occur to you earlier, when you were arranging these things meticulously in numerical order, that it was sort of strange that the parts were labeled one, two, three, four, five . . . and nine? Of course that’s a fucking six, it’s just upside down so it looks like a nine. It’s a mistake anyone could make, really. At least that’s what you tell yourself. But at the moment you hate this project and you hate your husband and you grab the slab and hand it to him and then you knock back the rest of your drink. Four hours later you are extremely buzzed and barely speaking to each other, but the thing is mostly assembled and fairly sturdy and you decide not to worry about the extra hardware because obviously they just put a few spare pieces in the box. How very thoughtful of them.

  “At Least You’re Not Married to Him”

  I learned long ago to not even be in the room when my husband works on a project. Last Christmas we attempted to put together a play kitchen for our then two-year-old. My job was simply to put on the stickers; I let him do everything else. After one too many “suggestions” from the husband about my sticker application technique, I left and hid in the bathroom trying not to cry. Perfection is overrated!

  TJ

  If you want to really test the strength of your marriage and your sanity, flip a house together. No really, it’s fun! (If you like having daily squabbles in front of dozens of strangers at various building-supply stores and watching your hair fall out in clumps.) It’s rewarding! (Wow! Look at this killer place you’ve lovingly created for someone else to live in.) You can make a lot of money! (You can also lose your life savings and your mind, but if it was easy everyone would do it, so don’t be such a wuss.)

  Using the only money we had—our handy equity line of credit—Joe and I bought a full-on fixer-upper, a bargain at not much over seven figures. Yes, those seven figures, a reflection of entry-level prices in our hometown hamlet of Santa Barbara at the time, which was probably the pinnacle of the decadelong real estate boom. The house itself was a Brady Bunch special, only smaller and much more run-down, complete with a choppy, dysfunctional floor plan; ancient, rusty appliances; stained, threadbare carpets; a shoebox-size “master” bathroom; and lattice-covered windows that, judging by several similarly “original” homes still standing in the neighborhood, must have been very chic in the 1950s. It had a hideous, dated roofline that would have to be somehow altered without compromising the integrity of the structure it covered, and the yard was a jungle of weeds surrounded by a feeble chain-link fence. We gave ourselves six weeks and what we thought was a decent chunk of borrowed change to do the necessary work, which basically entailed rebuilding the thing from the ground up.

  Quit laughing; it’s rude. We really thought we could renovate a dilapidated house and not blow our meager timeline or our ridiculously tight budget, okay?

  It wasn’t like we were rookies—we practically had our own parking spot at Home Depot—and it wasn’t as if we came up with the time and money figures arbitrarily, either. We created elaborate spreadsheets based on actual figures and past experience, and we even padded the expenses and the timeline to include the things we might have overlooked. But construction is unpredictable. Vendors are unreliable. Inspectors are impossible. Opening up a single wall is like ripping the lids off a thousand cans of worms and setting the slimy bastards loose at your feet. Parts sell out, people flake out, and paint colors look nothing at all on a wall the way they do in a can or on a two-inch card. And when you’re experiencing a hundred just such frustrations every single day alongside the person with whom you share a sink and a bed over at your other house—the one that is in sad need of attention because who the hell wants to work on two houses at the same time?—that person becomes your own personal punching bag. (Emotionally at least. I’m proud to admit that other than the ice-to-the-temple incident, neither Joe nor I have ever laid an angry finger on the other.) What’s more, each of you begins to feel that whatever part you are contributing is the one that really matters the most.

  “I need the sink hardware today,” Joe announced to me as he was walking out the door to “work” one morning. Never mind the fact that we both had full-time jobs and two small children; time is major money when you’re carrying two mortgages, and that flip was one nasty, demanding boss. (We’re both self-employed, so at least our other bosses were being semireasonable.)

  “I bought it online and it hasn’t come yet,” I informed him.

  “Well, then please go down to the plumbing store and get another one because we need it today,” he said, visibly struggling to speak without snarling.

  “The girls have dentist appointments this morning and I was going to bring them with me to the tile store afterward to pick out the backsplash,” I tried to explain. I left out the part about the actual, paying work that I should be doing but that was once again getting bumped for a flip-related task.

  “You want me to pick it out, then?” he asked, knowing what my answer would be.

  Well, of course I didn’t want him to do that. We each had a clearly defined role
in this project, and those roles were based on our individual, indisputable skill sets: I was form, he was function. He made it work, I made it look pretty. If we were going to get tippy-top dollar for this pad—which we damned well had to or we’d be living in our cars on an all-rice-andbeans diet at the end of it all—it could not have the clearance rack passé-brass faucet set Joe might be inclined to buy.

  “I’ll reschedule the goddamned dentist and do the tile store tomorrow,” I sighed.

  To be fair, the whole flip thing was a fluke. We knew someone who knew someone who worked for the show, and when this friend-of-a-friend heard we’d bought a house to renovate and sell, she suggested we apply. We wouldn’t be compensated financially for our willingness to look like nationally televised idiots, but we would get professional input and hopefully the cameras would add an unnecessary element of urgency. We discussed it only briefly, too consumed with the actual work before us to imagine the possible consequences of completing it in front of an audience. “It’ll be fun to watch someday!” we agreed, not quite realizing it might take many, many decades before we would be able to view it without cringing.

  Imagine wallpapering a room or installing a new ceiling fan with your significant other. Now multiply that little project times infinity plus thirteen and throw in a camera crew following you around 24/7, and you’ll have a tiny, vague idea of what those fourteen weeks—yes, it took 2.3 times longer than we had estimated—looked like. And the cameras weren’t relegated to the property; oh no. They tagged along on every paint store and dump run, rolled tape during every meeting, filmed us frantically trying to stay on top of our respective nonconstruction jobs, thoughtfully documented both of our daughters’ birthday parties, and even followed our family as we hiked up a mountain one beautiful Saturday morning in an effort to escape the toxic cauldron that was the job site. Thankfully the final cut of the show featured only a handful of the hundreds of marital arguments, both minor and massive, that transpired during that highly stressful time. Sometimes just knowing that those endless hours of unused raw footage may still be out there keeps me awake all night.

  “At Least You’re Not Married to Him”

  I love my husband and we have been happily married for ten years. That being said, I don’t know why his projects are always more important than mine. Example: I am sitting at the table with about a thousand pictures in a thousand piles trying to organize the last five years of our lives, and he is going to hang a picture (that has been sitting on the floor in the hall for about ten months . . . another story completely! Christ.). He gets the picture and gets the ladder and is holding the picture up to the spot on the wall where he thinks it might look good and then bellows to me from the hall. “Shell, can you get me the picture-hanging thingy? And can you grab a hammer? And do you see the level in your toolbox?” Which is yet another story that I have to have my own toolbox . . . which I hide for my own protection, because he never puts anything away and can’t ever find his own fucking tools.

  SHELLY

  Having survived that emotional and mental tsunami (which earned us enough money to take a whole week off to celebrate and survive reentry into the real, sawdust-free world), you’d think we’d have learned how to co-construct harmoniously. I wish I could say that you were right. We still argue over fixtures and finishes and wants versus needs and how much is it going to cost and whether we should attempt to salvage the old materials and hardware when we fix up a room or splurge on nice, shiny new ones.

  “These windows are fine,” Joe insists, running a hand over the chipping paint and splitting wood framing the nearest one. “We have an old house, Jenna. It’s not supposed to be perfect.”

  “I’m not asking for perfection,” I maintain. “It’s just that now that the walls are so smooth and the paint is so clean and everything, the windows look even worse. Plus wouldn’t it be nice if we didn’t have to put buckets under them when it rains and stuff towels around the sills when it’s windy?”

  “Next time don’t pick a hundred-year-old house,” he huffs.

  “Next time don’t build a fancy, supersized bar with a beer tap out back, and we’ll have plenty of money for new windows,” I fire back.

  The biggest problem is our priorities. Maybe it’s because I’m a Taurus, or perhaps it’s because I’ve lived in New York and Paris and L.A., or maybe it’s because my dad was a builder so I grew up around model, showcase homes, but I like my house to look nice. I can’t help it. Joe, on the other hand, thinks that aesthetics should always and forever take a backseat to practical matters. Which means when he discovered that half of the house still featured antiquated, unsafe knob-andtube wiring (that’s K&T to us builder’s brats), he took the money I’d been hoping to spend on a new couch—a fancy one without claw marks and everything—and spent it on stupid electrical supplies. Crap you couldn’t even see.

  “You’ll thank me when the house doesn’t burn down,” he insisted.

  “If it burned down, could I get a new couch?” I asked.

  He ignored me.

  “So if it doesn’t burn down, you’re saying I am going to be living with this faded, stained, cat-clawed couch for the rest of my life?” I asked.

  “They’re your cats,” he reminded me unnecessarily.

  “This couch is twenty years old!” I repeated for the kazillionth time. “I just think we deserve a new one.”

  “And I think our daughters deserve to live in a safe home,” he countered solemnly. Damn him! Whipping out the old children’s-best-interest card. That was just low.

  “Well, I hope they don’t get poked with an old rusty spring from the fucking couch and get tetanus and have to have a limb amputated,” I said, stalking from the room.

  “At Least You’re Not Married to Him”

  When we were renovating our house, my husband was a complete obsessive-compulsive. Every decision took weeks. Decisions about tile, molding, trim, carpet, fixtures, windows, doorknobs, etc., were each painful episodes in our relationship. Ultimately, I would fold. If I had an opinion that varied from his, he would beat me down with questions about my reasoning. And it didn’t end there; even after I explained my rationale for my choices, he would suggest alternatives. I couldn’t deal with most of it and would just give in. It’s easier to just maintain the peace, right? We had agreed that I was going to be the one to choose all the paint colors, but I wound up in the hospital with severe abdominal pain in the middle of the project. As I writhed in pain in the hospital, my husband and the contractor spread paint color samples all over the bed and I made my selections. Seven days later I was home, after two surgeries and missing a gallbladder—and my husband had changed almost every single thing I’d chosen.

  VICKY

  Not even including the flip house, Joe and I have undertaken hundreds of construction projects together. I’m not talking about putting together a swing set or building a doghouse or outfitting a pantry with new shelves (although we’ve done those things, too). I’m talking about full-scale, live-in-it, multimonth, add-a-room, move-a-wall, rent-a-jackhammer, washdishes-in-the-bathtub-for-weeks endeavors. Our single refrigerator lived in the garage for so long during one kitchen remodel that I’d automatically shuffle sleepily outside every morning to get the cream for my coffee even months after the project was finally finished. Despite having more than a decade of experience under our well-worn tool belts, our very last joint venture—the building of the aforementioned and long-awaited Zen retreat of a master bathroom in the house my husband insists we are going to live in until we die—wasn’t without its challenges.

  Every night after the kids went to bed, we’d meet in the dirty, dusty space of our future sanctuary and debate the infinite design possibilities. Before long, we dubbed our nightly meeting the “FUF,” short for Fuck-You Fest—because invariably, no matter how hard we each tried to be flexible and understanding, that’s pretty much what it was.

  “You ready for the FUF?” he’d ask, handing me a very full wineglass. It
’s absolutely not a FUF without adult beverages.

  “Bring it,” I’d reply with mock antagonism, accepting the goblet and clinking it against his beer glass.

  “Where do you want your main light switch?” Joe asked one night at the onset of the evening’s FUF. Christ, he already sounded impatient, and we were just starting. I took a hearty swig of my wine.

  “Right here,” I said, carpenter’s pencil poised to make a big fat X at the center point. I’d sneaked into the construction zone earlier and mentally arranged all of the hardware and outlets and accessories to determine the perfect placement. I knew that when Joe was working, he liked immediate answers, and I was ready. Plus when you grow up as a builder’s daughter, you know how these things work.

  “You can’t have it there,” Joe said plainly. “There’s a pipe running behind that wall.”

  “Oh, okay,” I stammered, unprepared for this kink in my carefully thought-out design.

  I thought for a moment, surveying the space.

  “I guess it could work here,” I said, moving my pencil toward the only other even remotely acceptable spot on the wall. Damn it all to hell, that’s going to look like ass and it isn’t a functional place for a light switch at all, I thought to myself. But I was trying to be flexible—something that’s not in my nature.

  “Can’t have it there, either,” Joe replied, shaking his head. “Once I put the trim piece on, there won’t be room.”