My local bookstore has shelves of relationship books with titles like "Women Can't Hear What Men Don't Say," "It's a Jungle Out There, Jane" and even "Verbal Abuse Survivors Speak Out."

Shut up, wimps. By definition, everyone survives verbal abuse. Try surviving builders, plumbers, electricians and roofers around the house.

I was looking for a book on the most important kind of relationship in the Bay Area, the one between homeowner and contractor. I couldn't find anything on the subject.

"Homeowners are from Chapter 11, Contractors are from Novato" has yet to be written, and neither has "Kitchen Remodeling Survivors Speak Out."

My wife and I are retaining wall survivors.

We were among the lucky ones. We somehow found a great contractor who rebuilt our retaining walls, adding value to the house (as they say) and more importantly preventing the subtraction of value if El Nio washed the house down the hill.

In two weeks, this guy replaced rotten wood and our bank account with steel, concrete and pressure-treated fir that would stop cannonballs. Soon he'll be off to Micronesia for a month, as part of the three months of vacation he takes each year.

While our contractor is hiking around Yap, I'll be looking at my retaining wall, trying to recall what was so hard about that shop class I flunked in junior high school.

A few years ago the guy who rebuilt our deck took three weeks off in the middle of the job to go sailing. He didn't have a bumper sticker on his boat saying, "I'd rather be building decks."

But he eventually built a great deck, and later took us out to dinner at his yacht club in Tiburon to celebrate.

Finding a good contractor is harder than finding someone to love. In these flush times, all the good contractors are taken, as women always say about men.

You can't easily dump a bad contractor, either. A broken heart mends itself, but not a hole where the roof used to be.

We've had good luck with our contractors. Not only are they exceptionally talented and honest in their work, but they're interesting people.

Our deck man was a former western regional sales manager for a Fortune 500 company. Our painter was once a philosophy professor. Our retaining wall guy is a trained engineer, world-traveler and patron of film festivals.

These guys are all taken, too. And not just by beautiful women, but by clients.

I'm in the wrong business. Damn that sadistic shop teacher.

All that dot-com money is pouring into new bathrooms, extra bedrooms and grotesquely huge new homes built where little cottages once stood.

There are two kinds of people who hire contractors. There are those of us who bought a fixer-upper fully loaded with peeling paint, leaky roof, sagging deck and ancient wiring and plumbing. We fix one thing at a time by triage method, as we squirrel away money.
Our houses are like the Golden Gate Bridge. Once we finish everything, it'll be time to put on paint and a roof again.

Then there are those who rip up a perfectly good house and start over. One of my neighbors has been building additions, walls and gates on her house for three years and the place still isn't finished.

Her contractor is a wonderful young man, and I understand the impulse to keep such a handy guy around as long as there's money in the market and outdoor Tuscan ovens to build.

If I were rich, though, I'd want to buy a finished house, just as I'd want a finished Mercedes.

To tell the truth, I'm not the one to write the contractor relationship book. My contribution to the retaining wall affair was to do some talking after work with the contractor and put out coolers of soft drinks for him and his workers. I'd say things like, "Sure, we might as well widen the driveway. Two thousand extra, sure."

My wife, who works at home, is the real retaining wall survivor. She had to be there all day, listening to the drilling and letting in guys to use the bathroom.

We're not the outhouse upper class. We couldn't afford a prestigious Porta-Potty, sign of the big-time remodeling job.

And when it comes to money, my wife is the one who cares about details like how much crushed granite costs.

She's always the tough guy in financial matters. I'm from a New England family that would rather talk about Wesson oil orgies than money - without any old New England money not to talk about.

A contractor could get the idea I'm rich, if he didn't look too closely at the Hawaiian shirt from Mervyn's.

My wife lets them know we care about where every dollar goes - in our house, that is. She doesn't care if it eventually goes into the Micronesian economy.

What we have here, then, is the eternal Bay Area triangle - a couple and a contractor.

If I did write the book, the title would be: "I'm OK, You're OK, but I'll Have to Get my Wife's OK."