"IT'S FULL OF ROCKS!"

Mrs. Ref likes those TLC shows where people take a perfectly good house and do something creative with it.

I prefer to leave a perfectly good house intact. Or, if I had the money, to pay one of those TLC experts to get creative.

Before we moved here, the house was in need of some TLC. Former renters had absolutely trashed the place. But the community came together, cleaned it out, painted it all white and had the wood floors refinished.

Mrs. Ref is working on being creative with those stark rooms, one room at a time. House decorating around here is sort of like the ongoing paint job at Murphy Brown's house by Eldin.

Anyway . . . We have a window seat in the dining room. Mrs. Ref thought it would be cool to cut out spaces in the panels for some boxes to store all our games. She bought some boxes with casters that were the perfect size. Then we invited some friends over for dinner. He's a contractor, so he actually knows how to use tools.

I couldn't stay because it was drill night at the fire department. When I got home, one panel had been cut out, but then put back in place.

"What happened?" I asked.

She pulled the piece off to reveal a bench window seat filled with sawdust and the same stone that makes up our foundation.

I didn't want to say, "I told you so," so instead I just looked at her and said, "Uh huh."

So now we have a hole in a perfectly good bench seat that leads to the rocks of the foundation. Supposedly this will all be fixed before my in-laws show up on Monday.