Over the past eight months, I’ve spent most of my spare time out in our garage at the back of our lot. No, I wasn’t in trouble (at least not very often) and no, I wasn’t out there secretly drinking (at least not all the time). I was working to turn our garage into a home office.

I didn’t set out to do anything fancy. I just wanted to put in some French doors, slap up wallboard and maybe install a gas heater. I’d bring home a few 2-by-4s each weekend, put up a few feet of wall, and then knock off with a beer or two.

Everything was going along pretty well, both 2-by-4-wise and beer-wise, until my wife had a friend over to see the project. She took one look at the huge old barn door we were pulling off the front of the garage, weighing around 300 pounds, and her eyes went wide.

Why not use the door inside the garage? She’d seen a picture in a magazine where someone had refinished an old barn door and reused it as a design element. My wife immediately agreed.

I stared at them for a moment, then at the huge old paint-encrusted, broken-down door I’d been planning to break into pieces. Design element! We didn’t need no stinkin’ design elements! I had a hammer in my hand. If I had bugged out my eyes and ran them off, I could have ended this conversation right then and there.

I wasn’t fast enough. They were already walking around trying to figure out where the door would look best. My wife thought it ought to hang on an overhead track, a perfect door between the front and back rooms. I stood there shaking my head. I never realized there was going to be a front and back room, let alone a door between them.

Deep down, I knew it would do no good to argue. My wife is always looking for stuff other people discard and trying to save it. It’s why we have a coffee table that used to be a workman’s chest. It’s why we have a flea-bitten dog from the pound. Heck, it’s why we’re married at all.

My wife spent the next eight weekends out on the driveway, using up can after can of industrial paint stripper, peeling away 80 years worth of hardened paint. Three or four times, she almost gave up — at my suggestion. Finally, after she’d gone through three scrapers, 27 dust masks, and enough stripper to remove the paint from the Brooklyn Bridge, it was ready.

She traveled hours to a store that sold barn hardware to get a big metal track so we could hang it from the ceiling, and I spent countless hours out in the garage trying to get the old door to hang and move across the rails smoothly.

When the big old slab was finally in place, I had to admit, almost proudly, that it looked like a — I was searching for the right words — a design element! I was proud of myself for thinking of it, and almost, almost forgave my wife for trying to talk me out of it.

The door worked beautifully all winter, and helped separate the front room from an unheated storage room in the back. Then, however, the warm spring weather came.

One night last week I was sitting on the couch, aimlessly flipping TV channels, when the phone rang. It was one of my daughters calling from the office.

“Daddy?” she said, “We’re out in the office. Mommy wants you to come out here. Now!”

I got off the couch and went outside. By the time I reached the office, my wife and daughter were in the middle of the room, pointing and hopping up and down on their toes the way they do when I need to squash a bug.

As I started to roll up a copy of People, my wife shook her head. A magazine, she said, wasn’t gonna do it. I looked over to where she was pointing.

It turns out that she wasn’t the only one attracted to a decaying barn door. It was covered with a swarm of crawling, falling, flying termites. They were pouring in and out of the cracks so fast it looked like termite Grand Central. I suddenly remembered something important:

It was all her idea.

source : By Peter McKay