Ann and Laurie upholster the dining-room chairs.

Ty trims several inches off each piece of Hildi's "pie." He shouts to Hildi over the machine noise that it won't fit through the door. Hildi says she was coming to tell Ty the same thing. He shouts that 36" won't quite go through there. Once again, I can't believe no one's measured the doorways to check beforehand. What about the windows? Some of them are huge. Maybe they open wide enough. Or why not just build it in the room? It wouldn't be the first time they did that on this show. So now, on Day Two, these things aren't even built, much less primed or painted. Ty shouts that he's having to cut off four inches. That's a pretty large margin by which to miscalculate. "That means I pretty much have to start over!" Yup.

Gerald finds Laurie outside painting yet another one of her "odes" to an Abstract Expressionist. This time her victim is Hans Hofmann. She's working from a poster featuring his painting Magnum Opus, which has a strong red ground and a yellow rectangle to the right and a blue one to the far left. She gives Gerald a mini-lecture about how Hans Hofmann was one of Jackson Pollock's instructors as she hands him a brush. What? She's going to let him do it? Well, sort of. She holds his hand around the brush as she shows him how to throw paint on the canvas.

Hildi's ready to unroll her carpet. She says she got it at Lowe's for fifty-one cents per square foot, and that they have five hundred square feet in there. Holy mackerel. I had estimated to Professor Frink that this room must be 20' x 25'. Even if those aren't the exact dimensions, I'd say I'm getting pretty good at estimating size on the show. Which is not too shabby for someone who used to be pretty bad at doing it even in real life. (Hee! I just noticed that Veronica's wearing some kind of fuzzy yellow slippers. Cute.) So the carpet cost around $250. That is pretty damn good. That's Vern country.

Laurie's more or less finished with the canvas, which she holds up for the camera. One can hardly fail to notice that she's decided to do away with the blue rectangle. I also notice she usually only picks dead artists for these little projects, because the live ones would come after her. Then again, I can't really see her wanting to do an "ode" to Jeff Koons or Barbara Kruger or Christo or Cindy Sherman. Maybe she could wrap the Washington Monument in some really handsome daffodil, russet, and sage silk. Wouldn't that be amazing, y'all? Laurie says the painting is going in John and Veronica's dining area. She holds up the poster for comparison. She asks Gerald if he can see it, and if he's feeling it. Gerald: "Well, I can see it..." Laurie freely admits, "Now, ours is nothing compared to Hans Hofmann." Especially considering you bastardized the composition by omitting the blue rectangle that didn't work with your colour scheme. Philistine. Laurie says they're just paying tribute. She keeps asking Gerald if he can see it. She seems to want him to praise it. Gerald is polite but unmoved: "Well, I can see the...colours." Laurie laughs: "It's abstract...abstract painting." I don't think Gerald is implying he doesn't "get" it, as she seems to be assuming with her "explanation" that it's abstract. I think he's saying, "Whatever, lady. It don't look like the Hofmann." Politely, though.