About two years ago, I came up with a brilliant idea.
My wife worked at home as a journalist, but her home office was in a cramped little room at the back of our house. It was cold in the winter, hot in the summer and too close to kids, distractions and, as she pointed out, me.
We had an old detached garage, however, at the back of our property. The garage was built somewhere around 1920 to hold a Model T, and while we could get our modern, full-sized family car inside if we inched forward with care, we couldn’t open the doors once we did so. Unless we were willing to go out and get a Model T, it was useless as a garage.
I spent the next year-and-a-half ripping apart the garage and rebuilding it as an office studio, with French doors, heated floors, even a minibar alcove in the back. I put in high-speed Internet, two phone lines and cable TV.
Whenever we’d have guests over, they’d peer out the windows and ask for a tour of the little place out back. It was more comfortable, and more impressive, than our actual house.
It was just about the moment that I was putting the last nail in place on a piece of trim, after 18 months of plodding, sometimes discouraging labor, that my wife announced that she’d be working full time, at an actual office with real co-workers, and that she wouldn’t need the home office anymore.
At first I stared in disbelief, then shock, then anger, then tears. I went through all 12 stages of grief over pointless home renovation in about 60 seconds.
Then it hit me. For months, every guy I’d shown the garage to had remarked what a perfect male getaway it would make. You know, a “Man Cave.”

post-gazette.com