After Booboo finished insulating, the rockers put up the drywall and plasterers covered it with three coats. Then Lou's crew hung doors, trimmed them out, wainscoted hallways. Winter became spring. We installed the floors and built mantels and cabinets: ash in the south wing, cherry in the north. We milled lots of wood. Nothing came off the shelf at this place; everything was custom-made and no expense was spared. I heated my house with rejected hardwood that looked fine to me. "Fine" wasn't good enough. We were aiming for perfection.

This perfectionism gave me an excuse to chat with the archaeologists more than the other tradesmen did: One of my jobs was carrying construction debris from the house to the dumpster parked a hundred yards away, and my route passed the little dig. The archaeologists were under strict instruction to keep mum about their work. They wouldn't tell us anything and I swear that they looked over their shoulders before even answering a "good morning!" That house generated about 30 dumpsters' worth of waste, a hundred cubic yards of sawdust alone, so I walked by them a lot. The Brazilians called me "Rei do Lixo," king of trash.

Mrs. Wetherell visited the site from time to time, usually accompanied by a very nervous woman said to be an interior decorator. I pushed the broom and carried heavy stuff from here to there. The architect also visited; he was also a nervous person. The house was behind schedule and I think he was under the gun. Everything went wrong on this site. The foundation sank half an inch. Machines broke. Rooms flooded. We talked a lot about a jinx. Weird stuff happened. Manufacturers sent the wrong parts; things fell off parked trucks.

The pool crew dug the pit and framed it, poured it. They departed, leaving two dumpsters' worth of framing debris behind for me to clean up. In April and May we workers ate lunch in the empty pool, out of the wind. The archaeologists took their lunch by their trailer, which rocked in the near-gale. Carpenters, electricians, plumbers and masons discussed Wetherell's dance with Barry Diller and USA networks; they handicapped strategies in that proxy war and debated which mattered more: content or the technology to push it. Should CMGI spin off Lycos? What about AltaVista? Ubid? How many IPOs would we see this year? So many permutations of the deal! When Wetherell walked away from Diller's offer, opinions on the work site were mixed. Some said he should have taken the money and run. Others said no way: With Wetherell at the helm CMGI would soon outflank Microsoft itself. Nobody, they said, understood the new economy better than D.W. He was the modern Midas.

But not everybody sitting in that pool was a fan. Some, like me, were sick of the cult of technology and bored with yet another incarnation of the capitalist-as-savior. And others thought it was simply wrong to put a house there at all. The wash-ashores felt less strongly about this than native Vineyarders did. But Stevie had bowhunted deer here all his life, and Jeremy the painter had camped out with his father on the beach and not seen a soul for three days, and Sandy, who made deliveries for FedEx, had mown hay here riding on her father's lap. Under the old regime the locals had been allowed customary usage. But Wetherell, like all the new money people, put up No Trespassing signs.

"It's a fucking abomination," Sandy said one day as I signed for a package of saw blades. "I hate this place. It used to be so magical, and now it's just another Vegas whorehouse." In fact I got the sense that most of us felt at least a little slimy about our work there, even those who had bought stock in CMGI.

Summer came; Noman's turned bright green. Most of the south wing was done, and we heard that the family was determined to come for August, come hell or high water. The pool filled up and the surrounding area was sodded. We framed out the pool house, put the filtering machinery in its basement. And then we went back to the main house and built the theater in that basement. For sound insulation the walls and ceiling were 10 inches thick; I carried a truckload of plywood down those 18 steps one sheet at a time. No gym workout was ever so punishing as that day's work.

The great room was still unfinished. Home to the table saw, band saw, planer, chop box and compressors and cords, the great room, in the north wing, was the heart of the house. The ceiling arches, carved by Mennonites in Pennsylvania, were 28 feet high. We built scaffolding to install the ceiling woodwork and made jokes about Michelangelo.

Phone calls: The architect took a call on the phone in the great room; I turned off the shop vac so he could hear. There was shouting on the other end. The architect turned red and didn't say much. He hung up and I went back to vacuuming. I guess he didn't know that there was a more private phone downstairs. I did, and I used it when I needed privacy. From the phone in the boiler room I called my agent. Hollywood was nibbling and the agent wanted me to do some more rewrites.

The furniture arrived before the spiral staircase was done: That thing took a month to install! We had to lift it into place using our backs for leverage, 15 men. I was actually afraid that my neck was going to snap. Heated words: The staircase men wouldn't allow its use so the furniture movers used ladders to get their stuff to the second floor. I've done plenty of work on ladders and I'm not afraid of them. But I've also been a furniture mover, and I would have walked off the job before I tried that stunt. One slip and you could break a leg so badly they would have had to amputate.

Mr. Wetherell was in Europe on business. Mrs. Wetherell was directing. She said to me, "I told David that if he ever wants to do this again, he had better get a new wife." She was pleasant to me; we talked about children and Harry Potter. Over 10 conversations that year she and I probably spoke for three minutes, total. I knew my place.

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