An Ounce of Prevention

My mom was an artist, you know the type. She was the smartest woman I knew but an incredible flake too. When bussing began in Louisville, my dad decided we needed to move out to Oldham county. So they found three acres of land and because mom was the artist, she drew up the house she wanted. It was an ‘American’ English Tudor.

So mom decided to forgo having a general contractor build the house because her daddy knew how to build houses and so she just knew because he knew and stuff. So she built the house.

The thing was that she didn’t have much experience in design and she didn’t know how to do plumbing, or heating, or cooling, or insulation or any damn thing else for that matter but she did know a couple of builders.

She saw a huge stained-glass window from a church that had been taken down and so she bought it for like $100. It was about 3 foot wide and 20 feet high. So she wanted it in our house so she built a foyer to put it in, that we only ever used to put a Christmas tree in. Because she didn’t know how to do insulation, it was drafty and freezing cold and the roof leaked constantly because she didn’t know what she was doing and neither did the guys she hired to put it on the front of the house. I always hated it.

About 15 years after she built the house, she finally had the money to finish it because my parents got…