The first time Keri Russell blurted out the three tiny words that a besotted Shane Deary desired to hear, it wasn’t while they were holding hands on a sandy beach or sharing an embrace beneath the moon. She called Deary, alarmed by the gas smell at her newly acquired Manhattan co-op, a duplex wreck in a brownstone in West Village. Russell recalls, “He appeared in ten seconds flat, single-handedly pulled the enormous stove away from the wall and saved me from shutting off the gas supply to the entire building.”

It makes sense that the actress used the L-word after only six months of dating since he had spared her the wrath of other co-op members. She moved to New York City from Los Angeles in 2002, and a few years later she met Deary, a carpenter and contractor, through friends. “I relocated with a mattress, a stack of books, and my two kitties,” remarks Russell, who had just finished a lucrative four-year stint on the television show of the same name.

The Superman moment wasn’t the first time Deary impressed the pixie performer with his resourcefulness. On one of their first dates, he concocted a Rube Goldbergesque contraption to bar her cats from climbing into the kitchen cupboards. “He used whatever he could find in the apartment—a rubber band, a paper clip, some string,” Russell recalls with a smile. Deary, for his part, was merely doing what comes naturally. As the son of one of the most respected contractors on Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts, he grew up in a house his father built. “I remember him shingling it into the night by the headlights of his truck,” Deary says. The apple, as the saying goes, doesn’t fall far from the tree. In high school, he and his brother helped build a farmhouse made almost entirely of reclaimed materials. “I have a hard time passing by a Dumpster or a yard sale,” he adds. Of his many treasures, the less-is-more Russell is slyly enthusiastic: “I tell him it will all look good in his basement studio.”

The couple quickly moved to Brooklyn, got married, and had a son. They thought about living in a TriBeCa loft, but they were drawn to the idea of having an entire house and backyard. Russell was raised in the big sky states of Colorado and Arizona, while Deary was raised nearly totally outside on an island. The fact that “you can take a sledgehammer to anything and no one can complain” didn’t bother him either.