If you watch the home improvement shows, it looks so easy any idiot could do it. The reality, of course, is that it looks easy because the professionals know what they’re doing and how to do it. They have had years of experience. Learning a fresh skill is difficult enough without trying it based on watching days or weeks of work condensed to a half hour television show.

This, by the way, is experience speaking. I had a shell house built and my son and I decided, with no carpentry experience whatsoever, that we could finish the interior ourselves; after all, it looked so easy on television. With some help from my brother and sister-in-law, we almost finished the house. We laid pine plank flooring which turned out surprisingly well, but then we tried to build kitchen cabinets.

We spent hours a day for nearly a month building them and taking them apart and starting over, so that to call them a disaster would be kind. We bought unfinished cabinets and painted them. Painting, however, was also not as easy as it looked; they looked like kindergarteners did it. Then we tried to install them, but I bought based on room measurements, not layout ergo more cabinets. Once we got them all in place, we had no dining room because the island was too big. we decided we could live with it.

The problems in the kitchen sums up why the house isn’t finished. Some projects went really well (but not as posthaste or easily as on tv) while others were built and rebuilt ad nauseum. The ceiling took weeks and quiet isn’t completely finished, but it makes the kitchen glimpse remarkable better. It would have been wiser to have asked for advice, guidance, or HELP!

What we learned from this experience is that no two saws are alike, every nail gun has its own quirks, and that nothing is ever as easy as it looks on television.

There was a happy ending, my daughter liked the house and bought it from me. She has her own ideas for finishing it and the bank appraisal was a pleasant surprise. My son and I decided that we are through building for now and I bought a double wide mobile home.