The $50,000 Stove Handle and Other Perils of Home Improvements

B.J. Busch is associate librarian of academic and information services
at the University of Alberta.

Gordon Pape is more familiar to us as an expert on RRSPs and financial
planning than as one on home improvements. This is as it should
be—were he an expert on home renovations, he wouldn’t have spent
$50,000 on a stove handle, and this entertaining account of his foibles
and tribulations in pursuit of the perfect house would never have been
written. He did not, however, really spend $50,000 on a stove handle.
It’s just that it all started with a stove handle, and one thing led
to another.

Chapter by chapter, Pape takes us through various stages of his
four-year project, relating all the disasters that befell him and his
family and managing to put it all in a humorous perspective. For
example, after dealing with outrageous bills from plumbers who speak
Italian on the job, he is convinced that the main source of revenue for
the Mafia isn’t drugs or rackets at all—it’s plumbing. The
terrorist groundhog who nearly eats his way through the new $15,000
garden, the wine cellar from hell, and the leaky shower would strike
fear in our hearts were it not for Pape’s light touches. Some of the
background material seems like filler at times (life histories of his
dogs, vignettes from grad school days, renting furniture in London, his
kid’s “dog” of a house), but the reader certainly comes to know
the Pape family well.

All home renovators have a book like this inside them, but few have
Pape’s wry humor and writing skill. Give this book to friends and
relatives who have been through, or are about to embark on, a similar
experience. It will help them keep their perspective.