A haven for home improvement

Husband-and-wife journalists Bob Miller and Callie Clark Miller share the same small house, tiny bathroom and even the same office. But not always the same opinion. The Southeast Missourian sweethearts offer their views on every-day issues, told from two different perspectives.

SHE SAID: Shortly after they were married in 1943, my grandpa purchased his first piece of furniture for my grandma.

It was a dish safe a neighbor made by nailing together leftovers from broken furniture and plaster board. That's right. Plaster board. He paid $1 for it.

Nearly 60 years later, I stumbled upon the mostly rotted, bug-riddled dish safe stored in an abandoned house on my grandparents' farm in Van Buren, Mo.

Digging the piece out from the wreckage of the old farmhouse was just the first part of a two-year struggle to restore it (sans plaster board).

Due mostly to the physical strength and the endless patience God instilled in my husband, we eventually finished it.

Refurbishing the dish safe was just the beginning of a long line of home improvement projects Bob and I (well, mostly Bob) have taken on.

We've painted the living room twice. Painted the kitchen and refurbished the cabinets. Painted both bedrooms and the bathroom. Constructed a wall of built-in furniture for Drew's room and made a shabby-chic end table out of an old 16-pane window.

All of these home improvements were instigated by me and ultimately finished by Bob.

When we're working side-by-side on such projects, Bob gets a special glint in his eye that makes me think he's considering bashing me on the head with a hammer. Or at the very least doubting his sanity in marrying someone who loves to start projects full force but most often lacks the stamina to see them through.

Everyone in my family knows this about me. In all fairness, they did try to warn Bob, but I suspect he'd gone temporarily deaf from all the drilling and sawing.

HE SAID: Clumps of plaster littered my hair. My hands bled tiny drops. My feet hurt, my back ached, and my entire body was covered in a light film of white dust and regret.

I hate home improvement.

It should've been an easy-enough job. The rough spot on the small section of the bathroom wall had bothered me for years. Paint was flaking off and the substance behind the paint had started to crumble.

I've got to get that fixed, I kept telling myself every time I took the throne.

Callie, as she so often does, expedited the project when she came home one night with a gallon of paint and a bunch of cutesy doodads.

In typical Callie fashion, God bless her, she put the home improvement cart before the home improvement horse. We never do things in the proper order at the Miller house. It would make sense, of course, to fix the wall first, then paint. But had she not started painting, I'd still be looking at that bad spot from the throne, telling myself I needed to fix it.

Like all home improvement projects I attempt, this one too was more complicated and profanity-invoking that I expected. I hate home improvement.

Our house was apparently built before the invention of drywall. So the wall didn't come down in neat pieces. It floated down in dust.

I pulled and tugged, cut and pounded and kicked. About 12 hours after I started, I finally had a 3-foot-by-8-foot section of wall torn down.

My wife, for some reason, encourages this type of activity. She, God bless her, likes to buy me all sorts of tools. And I use them, too, because she threatens me with them if I don't. She bought me a table saw, which I love, a miter saw (which I don't know how to use because I lost the directions) and an assortment of wrenches, screwdrivers, nuts and bolts.

The wall went back up easier than expected, but that's because Callie did most of the work as far as plastering goes. We cut the new drywall incorrectly (measure twice, cut once? Nah. Measure twice, cut twice), but we patched up our mistakes.

As I write this, the bathroom is still a mess. Plaster dust covers the floor. There's that wall, unfinished, still calling my name when I take the throne. More work to do.

Argh. I hate home improvement.

(Wife's note: If anyone knows how to operate a basic miter saw, please e-mail instructions, using small, simple words, to bmiller@ semissourian.com)