Home Improvement I'm living in a cave right now. All of the windows on our house are covered with brown paper and tape. The rooms all have an eerie, brown glow to them. I'm spending lots of time in my office at the computer because it's the only place in the house where I can see outside. We've been living like this for six days now, and I don't think I can take much more. Our handyman/painter put the paper up on Saturday so that he could paint the outside of our house. We've been talking about painting since we bought the house, almost two years ago. Right now, it's a bright sky blue, which I hate. And I know our neighbors hate it, too - especially the ones who live across the street and have to look at it each day. It was such a good feeling to finally pick out the paint color - sage green with a deep red front door - and see the paper go up on the windows. I felt like we were making progress. But the good feeling didn't last very long. Saturday ended up being too windy to paint. Nothing happened the next day because the painter doesn't work on Sundays, which is perfectly understandable. I crossed my fingers and hoped for Monday, but the weather conspired against us. A cold front blew in, and the temperature never got above 40: same thing for Tuesday and Wednesday. Thursday was warm enough, but it was raining, and you can't paint in the rain. Plus, my husband had started the handyman on another task, which I should have expected. There is something in Brandon's genetic makeup that renders him incapable of starting a simple project and keeping it simple. Something that sounds easy enough, like painting a garage, turns into replacing part of the garage roof and fixing an overhang on the house, all while I do the painting. I've seen it happen over and over again throughout our marriage. The best example is when I was pregnant with Ella. All I wanted done was to have the laundry room and front bedroom repainted. He called me at the office one day to tell me that he had good news and good news and bad news. The first good news was that he had taken the laundry room apart to paint it. The second good news was that the laundry room had hardwood floors underneath the linoleum. The bad news was that they were rotted through. That call started a four-week stretch of renovations that taxed my patience, especially since I was eight months pregnant. Brandon tiled the laundry room floor, which needed to be done. Then he knocked out our bathroom window and replaced it. We spent three days with black plastic sheeting in the window and then a week taking baths because the grout in the window had to cure. And since the laundry room was still ripped apart, I had to take all our clothes to the washateria for four weeks. After that, he ripped out the underpinning around the bottom of the house and replaced it, built limestone borders for the garden beds, and had workers scrape and repaint the whole house. Everything looked great, except my original requests were still undone. I ended up painting the laundry room while hugely pregnant, and Brandon didn't paint the baby's room until six days before Ella arrived, and even then I had to help. Our simple painting project has expanded already. He's decided we absolutely need to repair a drainage problem under our back deck. At the moment the deck is ripped up and the lumber is in stacks in the back yard. There are piles of dirt and rock in the driveway and a huge trench through the side yard. Brandon just came in and told me of his plans to expand the deck even more. I just looked outside and the steps to what was the deck are gone. It seems we're getting a bigger deck, no matter what I say or do. Budget is of no consideration to Brandon when he gets on one of these tears. No about of reasoning on my part will stop him from undertaking these projects. The renovations on our old house went on despite the fact that I was getting ready to go on maternity leave, and therefore be without a salary, for three months. His rationale is that we'll get the money back out when we sell the house, never mind that we may not be able to pay the mortgage. Each time I ask how much each stage of the project is going to cost, I get a shrug and a vague answer. I don't know how to stop him. So my house is still blue and the windows are still covered. I have no back deck and there's a trench in my side yard and heaps of dirt in my driveway. If only our handyman had been able to paint on Saturday - Brandon wouldn't have had time to dream up all of these new projects and we could have been done with it. I'd have a green house and would be able to see out the windows. The next time I need something done, I'm going to wait until Brandon is out of town and contract the project myself. Perhaps then I'll get it done without delay or detour.