The Dangers of a DIY Marriage

GUEST POST by Jess and Adam Robichaud of Radiant Marriage

What is it about the DIY movement? There’s something about doing things ourselves that is looked so fondly upon by so many in our daily lives. It’s a great thing, but it can be dangerous or even toxic if you apply it to your life or your marriage
The other day while on the phone with a good friend several states away, he told me (Adam) about a deck he’s working on adding to the back of his house and how much he had struggled with one of the foundational pieces. There was one very large board that he had to attach to the house. Everything else connects to this board. Being a foundational piece of the deck, it had to be perfectly in place, level, and very strongly fastened. If it wasn’t, the whole deck would be crooked, or it could even fall away from the house and hurt somebody. My friend is an engineer, and he knows that anything worth doing is worth doing well, so he had the biggest, strongest piece of lumber he could find for this important role. For the size deck he was building, it was probably close to 200 pounds and 30 feet long. Now I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to lift and balance a 200-pound object 30-feet long, or tried to hold that object perfectly in place and fasten it securely, but to say that it can be difficult is an understatement. It’s not the easiest with two people, but he was trying to do it alone, and no matter what he did, he just couldn’t get it quite right.

He was understandably frustrated…