Dave Barry: The Taming Of The Screw

YOU (showing your plan to the banker): Well, as you can see from this plan, to insure that the lateral stability of the main structural cross-members is adequate for the stress on the head jamb likely to be created by the rotational torque of the upper sash top rail, I’ll need to use a vapor degreasing system with at least 64 kilobytes of random access memory.

BANKER (extremely impressed): Here. Take $600,000.

Step #3: Get some land

Most local building codes require that houses be built on some kind of land. One excellent source of land is Iowa, which has scads of land that nobody ever uses for anything except growing corn, which is fed to pigs anyway, so I’m sure nobody would mind if you just took a smallish plot and built your house on it. The worst that could happen is that an Iowa farmer would tell you to move your house, and I doubt this would happen because every Iowan I’ve ever met has been extremely nice. Another advantage of Iowa is that it is located conveniently close to Kansas.

However, if you’d prefer not to locate your house in Iowa, don’t despair, because there’s lots of spare land around in other places, such as along the sides of interstate highways. Some of this land even has little picnic tables and people who come along from time to time to mow the grass, so if I were you I’d snap it up before someone else does, or the Iowans start growing pig corn on it.

Another land source is estates belonging to the rich. Many of these estates are enormous, so the odds are the rich will never even notice you, especially if they are famous rock stars who travel most of the time and even when they’re home they’re not all that observant on account of they spend most of their leisure time trying on clothes and ingesting narcotic substances.

Step #4: Buy a large quantity of house parts

The main thing is studs. Studs are these boards that are sometimes called “two-by-fours” because they are not two anythings by four anythings (see Chapter 2, “Wood”). Most houses contain billions of them. You’ll also need nails, a roof, and one toilet for each bathroom shown in your plan.

You can buy your house parts at a lumberyard, but as I pointed out back in Chapter 2 (see Chapter 2), the people who work in lumberyards are hostile and suspicious and they will probably try to trick you. You’ll ask for studs, and they’ll send you home with industrial sewage piping. So I recommend you get your house parts at a home center. The advantage of going to a home center is they give you little baskets and carts to put your house in, and you’ll always know how much you’re paying because there will be at least six price stickers on every stud. The only drawback is that most of the time the home center will be out of whatever you need, so you’ll have to make upwards of 600 trips (see Chapter 2 again; in fact, you might just as well stay in Chapter 2, for all the good this chapter is doing you).

Step #5: Standing on your land, attach the house parts together so they form a house shaped like the one in your plan.

Building an entire house may look difficult, but all it really takes is a little common sense and a willingness to accept the fact that you will never finish no matter how long you live. At the beginning, when you’re nailing large boards together, you’ll think you’ll be done in a matter of days, but pretty soon you’ll realize that the only materials you have left are skillions of little pieces of molding and pipes and wires and doorknobs representing 600,000 man-hours of extremely tedious work, and you’ll reach the point where all you do is sit on the floor and drink beer and fantasize that you live in a motel and you don’t even have to fold your own towels. I know a couple who live in a semicomplete house that they once tried to build, and after a couple of years they stopped even noticing that they have a pile of lumber in their living room. They just dust it off and put cheese and crackers on it when company comes. So good luck! I admire your spunk. Really.

A

Asia, lack of storage space in, 52

Avocado, ugliness of, 82

B

Bats, rabid, 43

Beam, Jim, 64

“Beaver, Leave It to,” 34

Bomb

cherry, 27

hydrogen,63

Blimp, Goodyear, 16

Blood

coming down stairs, 12

congealed oxen, 54

of primitive person, 2

c

Californians, 58

Cattle prod, 52

Chablis, 8

Chinese Communists, 19

Cleveland, Grover, 63

Comets, 40

Corsage, in toilet, 27

D

Debentures

and wood, 10

and transmissions, 78

Demons

and caulking, 36

and electricity, 12

Dinette table, enormous cats on, 12

Diseases

horrible lingering, 15

tropical, 8

Dogs, importance of keeping solder off, 61

Droppings, rodent, 29

E

Egypt, Great Pyramids of, 40

Eisenhower administration, 14

Elk, 71

Elkhart, Indiana, 22

F

Flamethrower, 24

Forefathers, our hardy, 84

Forklift, 52

Frenchmen relieving themselves on Germany, 26

G

Germans relieving themselves on France, 26

H

Hackensack, New Jersey, 12

Haddock, 18

Hordes, marauding barbarian, 46

Horizon, the, 46

Horror, The Amityville, 12

J

Jerky, beef, 15

Jupiter, planet of, 45

L

“Laverne and Shirley,” 58

Lint balls, 61

Lobsters, relentless motion of, 18

M

Maine, coast of, 48

Malted milk balls, 6

Memory, random access, 86

Middle East crisis, 44

Mincing, 28

Motors, General, 81

Murderers

ax, 31

mass, 58

Muskrat, 84

Mutant microorganisms, 60

N

Narcotic substances, 50, 87

Needles, red-hot knitting, 69

Neptune, planet of, 6

Newsweek magazine, 50

Nuts, granola-oriented ecology, 34

P

Pastries, gardening with, 71

Pool, bumper, 32

Puppies, heat being sucked out of, 40

R

Raisinets, 6

S

“Shirley, Laverne and,” 58

Sistine Chapel, 81

Solar systems, other, 78

Spiders, vicious, 23

Spittoon, brains of, 60

T

tarantulas, 40

Tentacles, tree, 37

Toads, 67

Toilet, Sir Robert, 26

Tonic, gin and, 44

Tripe, 8

Truncheons, 5

Turtles, plumbing and, 27

U

U.S. Constitution, color schemes allowed by, 83

W

War, nuclear, 15

Wayne, John, 76

Winter, Old Man, 45

Worms, earth, 32, 69

Z

Zucchini, 72