Gutted
Down to the Studs in My House, My Marriage, My Life
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
In the course of a few short months, Lawrence LaRose got married, bought a decrepit house in Sag Harbor with his wife, and lost his job. This is the story of how, while negotiating a cash-strapped, divorce-teetering first year of marriage, this unemployed writer and Manhattanite ended up bluffing his way onto a Hamptons construction crew in order to learn the skills for what became an enormous home-and life-renovation.
Lawrence LaRose coauthored the internationally bestselling The Code: Time-Tested Secrets for Getting What You Want from Women - Without Marrying Them! and promptly forgot his own advice. He lives with his wife and son in the paint section at KMart.
"Raucous-and ultimately heroic."-New York Times
"Gutted is the tough-love version of every home renovation book you've ever read...Gutted is jaw-droppingly funny."-Rocky Mountain News
"If Dave Barry were to renovate a house, the resulting story might be something like Gutted."-Atlanta Journal-Constitution
"[Gutted] takes you beyond the simple bricks and mortar of home renovation to places the gang on This Old House wouldn't go at gunpoint...A must-read."-Hartford Courant
Also available: HC 1-58234-392-6 $24.95
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
LaRose (The Code: Time-Tested Secrets for Getting What You Want from Women Without Marrying Them!) and his wife, Susan, have just bought a "small toenail-yellow Cape Cod" on Long Island. The "hapless victim" of decades of "punishing" remodeling, this ruin of a house needs full-blown CPR, not TLC. As the couple navigates the Kafka-esque local planning commission's permit process, they begin demolition tearing off siding, pulling out asbestos and taking out walls. Short on funds, LaRose signs onto a series of construction crews, not because he's got carpentry skills, but because he hopes to gain a few. As LaRose's days become increasingly blue-collar, married life morphs unexpectedly. Half the people they'd invited to their wedding seem to have disappeared from their lives completely. Free time is spent razing sections of their house, wandering the aisles of Home Depot, or wallowing in "home porn" Trading Spaces or This Old House on TV. As the bills and stresses pile up, this once-carefree couple contemplates divorce, but decides to stick together, which is a good thing, since not long after, Susan finds herself pregnant. In time, the baby is born, the house gets finished, and LaRose can even let himself wax philosophical, noting that this "little shit hole of a house" was the "transformative event" that taught him "how to be married." In the process of renovating their home, they were both "opened up, gutted, and painstakingly put back together." LaRose's readers may also find themselves wiser, and they'll certainly be very well entertained.
