In our 63 years of marriage, my husband and I have owned three homes. We moved into the last of the three 27 years ago, and it presented to my husband the opportunity to alter, improve on it, and make of it an expression of our tastes and values over the years. In all of the homes we've lived in he had set about making each a reflection of our love of art in all its variant forms.

He has built furniture, produced his own oil paintings, designed and made stained glass windows, installed outdoor stone-and-brick garden hardscapes, built a garden shed, closed the open-concept interior of the house, built doors, re-built the original counter-tops in kitchen and vanity-tops in bathrooms, tiled floors, laid hardwood, oak-floored our main staircase, panel-lined one of the upstairs rooms for a library with built-in bookcases and so much more. He has never been at a loss for new projects to throw himself into.

And in each of those homes he set about finishing the basement. When the children were really young it was to give them more space for rough-housing and entertaining themselves; the backyard shed he built away back then housed rabbits, poultry and pigeons. In our second house one of the downstairs rooms their father finished held a 'stage' where the children could produce and present whatever drama appealed to their imaginations for everyone's entertainment.

In the house we currently live in, finishing the downstairs meant installing drywall, ceiling tiles, plumbing for another bathroom, and electrical work. Apart from the bathroom there is a smallish room beside the furnace room, and a larger, all-purpose recreational room in front of my husband's workshop. In that workshop he has produced so many things, among them countless stained glass pieces; inserts for doors he has made, and stained glass windows for our house.

At the moment he is in the process of finishing yet another stained glass window, which will have a twin eventually, to be installed within two swing-out 'shutters' he made to measure. Life is never, ever boring alongside someone whose ambitions and curiosity impels him to try his mind and hand at everything that appeals to him.