The surface lesson of Lawrence LaRose’s house-renovation/relationship memoir “Gutted: Down to the Studs in My House, My Marriage, My Entire Life” (Bloomsbury, $24.95) is to pay someone to work on your home.
Because LaRose and wife Susan decided to rebuild their newly purchased Sag Harbor, N.Y., home themselves, they almost lost everything, including their two-year-old marriage, through poor planning and execution, unscrupulous construction types and massive credit-card debt.
It didn’t help that LaRose lost his job at a dot-com company. He scammed jobs on construction sites–his only experience being working on his own home. Give points to LaRose for being brutally honest about the near-destruction of his marriage (“If I were her,” he writes at one point, “I would leave me”).
The true lesson of “Gutted” is that with work, your relationship can withstand any trouble. Unfortunately, LaRose buries that point among the rubble of the Sag Harbor home. And if you’re not a fan of the intricacies of home improvement, you’ll be bored and lost. Just what, exactly, are “joists”?
Home Depot as the 9th circle of hell: “With luck, you will get out alive, but you can bank on being scathed, overwhelmed and abraded.”
