For several years I've been converting my finished attic into an unfinished one, in an attempt to reduce my assessable value. Once the dust settles there, I've got to redo the living-room walls; what I thought was textured paint turns out to be coffee grounds left in the bottom of the can. The good news on the home front is that the dining-room floor, where I pried off the linoleum eighteen months ago, is much less tacky and the cat no longer sticks to it.

Dad taught me all I know about remodelling by making an example of our house. Our house was like one of the great European cathedrals: never finished. Dad always had a project on the boil, some of which became legends on the block, where he was known as the King of Portland for his visionary use of cement in an attempt to turn our yard into a maintenance-free slab. He would have succeeded, too, if God had intended accountants to know about expansion joints. Instead, the yard bucked and heaved, thrusting jagged peaks of concrete into configurations so like Stonehenge that our yard attracted Druids.

When it came to converting wasted space in the basement, Dad put the "w" in "wreck" room. He transformed a boiler room into the cabinet of Dr. Caligari, using only instinct and material scrounged from accounting sites. The crowning glory was an innovative suspended ceiling where the pipes were suspended from the ceiling (a technique much in vogue today in public buildings, particularly of a penal stripe). During his "built-in" period he enjoyed considerable success creating the illusion the house had been built around the Zenith console radio, which (after Poe) he concealed in a bedroom wall with only its knobs protruding. The Murphy-bed-inspired ironing board never failed to elicit gasps (particularly when it fell open during dinner), and all four boys slept in drawers modeled after the sleeping quarters on the U-505 submarine and the Museum of Science and Industry.

I can still see Dad and my brother Arthur laughing for hours over a gallon of paint thinner, after which the home projects seemed to get even more ambitious: the garbageman-proof concrete trash bunker, the carpeted garage, and the pastel-block patio which laid to rest Mother's irises. When the paneling craze hit, Dad was among the first to realize it's potential, until everyone in the house seemed taller because of the vertical lines.