THE contractor shows up two days before Thanksgiving, rips out your kitchen, and doesn’t return until the new year, leaving you to roast goose in a toaster oven on top of the dryer for your holiday feasts. Or, the contractor arrives just before the rainy season to build your addition, digs a giant hole in the backyard, then disappears for months while you watch your ersatz swimming pool fill with mud.

   Anyone who has ever had home construction work has tales to tell: The contractor moves in, showing up while you’re still in your pajamas, and makes himself at home at the dining room table, sliding his lunch box on the antique patina while drinking out of your favorite cup. You can’t wait for the job to be over, largely so you can reclaim your domicile and peace.

   When, finally, the new floors are polished, the faucets installed, the baseboard molding trimmed, you wake up alone in your home — and find yourself missing the contractor.

   Stories about home renovation are rife with metaphor and psychological undercurrents. Rachel Simon has delved into the underlying meaning of what goes on when a house’s roots are torn asunder in her new memoir, Building a Home with My Husband: A Journey Through the Renovation of Love (Dutton, $24.95).

   Ms. Simon was the community relations manager at the West Windsor Barnes & Noble from 1995 to 1998, and will be returning to that store June 15 for a reading. Her 2002 memoir, Riding the Bus with My Sister (Houghton Mifflin Co.), was a bestseller and made into a Hallmark Hall of Fame movie, starring Rosie O’Donnell and Andie MacDowell and directed by Anjelica Huston. The new book continues with some of the same characters.

   We learn in the first paragraph that Ms. Simon has had an on-again off-again relationship with her now husband, Hal, for nearly two decades. Once she came to understand what love is, she writes, she agreed to marry him — although in the process of rebuilding their home, she comes to love him even more. Hal, an architect, is also the designer for this project, and the book is dedicated to “Husband, Architect and Court Jester.”

   When she married him, Ms. Simon moved into Hal’s row home in Wilmington, Del., but she never really liked the house, with its hole in the dining room ceiling from the bathroom up above. The clincher is when a burglar breaks into the house and steals her laptop, containing months of work she never got around to backing up.

   Ms. Simon, a full-time writer and writing coach, has taught creative writing at Bryn Mawr College, but after the first memoir about Beth, her intellectually handicapped sister, she became a spokesperson for people with disabilities. After the break-in, she convinced Hal they had to move.

   On reflection, considering the neighborhood and its people, the couple decided it would be best to make the house more habitable — starting by insulating the room Ms. Simon uses as a home office.

   The author is quick to point out that she’s ill at ease with all things related to home decorating, having lived in rented spaces over garages much of her adult life. “I’ve always been ill at ease with the third dimension,” she writes, preferring to deal with the abstract or the spiritual. She’s not one of the millions who watches “renovation TV.” She has “only felt at home among two decorating styles: Whatever’s Already in Place When I Move In, and Eclectic Mementos with Good Stories Behind Them.”

   All of which makes her the perfect partner for Hal. They don’t have to bicker over which style of faucet to use in their bathrooms, she’s ready to go along with his preference for a burnished finish. “And this is one of the lessons I learned about love during the years away from Hal: it’s awfully easy to invent battles when none actually exist,” she writes.

   One of the hardest things to do was to pack up all their possessions when Ms. Simon and her husband had to move out during the reconstruction. It involved a lot of purging, because the finished space — once the walls were insulated — would actually be less than what they started with. And they would lose two closets by connecting two bedrooms. “When you add framing, you take away floor space,” she says.

   But the purging was cleansing. It was part of her “search for the meaning of life 2.0,” and “getting rid of stuff was like molting.” She found new use for stuff by gifting friends with some of it. “I wasn’t losing memories, but passing them on.”

   Ms. Simon says Hal guided her through the process much as Beth guided her on the buses. But many home renovations are not so sanguine — they often lead to emotional upset and sometimes destroy marriages. In fact, Ms. Simon discovered a therapist who specializes in counseling those going through home renovation.

   As part of her research, Ms. Simon flew out to Palo Alto, Calif., to interview the therapist, Rachel Cox, who is married to a contractor. Previously a grief counselor, Ms. Cox realized that what her clients and her husband’s clients were going through was often the same thing. Home reconstruction often happens at the same time as major life upheavals: the birth of a new child, or a child going off to college; marriage or divorce; coming into an inheritance.

   Ms. Simon divides her book into sections that define her own emotional upheavals. In the “Demolition” chapter, the knocking down of walls is symbolic of the irrevocability of the decision to not have children, and grieving over that decision. “When the demolition is finished, you realize the decisions you can’t change open up new possibilities,” she says. “You can’t put the walls back but it opens new rooms.”

   When the job was nearly complete, one of the subcontractors accidentally set off an explosion that damaged part of the house. Ms. Simon and her husband were getting ready to move back in, but could not now that the repair would have to be made. The rental they were living in was sold, and they feared they’d have to move into their cars. The stress of being homeless was beginning to test their relationship.

   ”It gave me a strong understanding of what commitment is — when you’re at the end of your endurance and money, and I knew to expect disaster from the stories my husband had told of other projects,” she says.

   Hal sounds like the most agreeable, easy-going person on the planet. While Ms. Simon was at first feeling embittered after the explosion, Hal counseled her that anger was a liability. “‘No one was injured, the house survived, and we’ll get through it,’” she recounts him saying.

   Ms. Simon also touches on some of the heart-breaking events of her childhood, written about in the earlier memoir, such as when her mother abandoned the family when Rachel was a teenager. They have since reconciled, and she compares this to the experience of building a stone wall in the backyard, working through the pain to do what needs to be done for the common good.

   ”Everyone in the building industry knows that building a home is a metaphor for life, and they talk about it all the time,” says Ms. Simon. “We talk about relationships using construction terminology — ‘breaking down walls,’ ‘painting over the problem,’ ‘eyes are the window to the soul,’ ‘we’re wired differently.’”

   Ms. Simon admits she’d never liked the house, but after the explosion, “I started to feel sorry for the house. It was bereft, like a friend who’s life is torn apart. We moved into a place that was not only lovely, but had come to care about it because we had gone through the process. And that’s how it is with relationships: it may not be the kind of love you wanted, but it’s still a good kind of love.”

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  Building a Home with My Husband: A Journey Through the Renovation of Love author Rachel Simon will read from and sign her book at Barnes & Noble, 3535 Route 1 South, West Windsor, June 15, 7:30 p.m.; 609-897-9250; www.rachelsimon.com