It started out as a home-improvement project, but ended up as a home demolition.

Stevie Spencer of Denver, N.C., had taken a brief smoking break while painting his house.

Ready to go back to work, he tried to snuff out his cigarette – in a bowl of paint thinner. It ignited a fire that destroyed his house.

“I thought it was water,” he said of the clear liquid.

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Talk about a penny-ante policy.

The local power company in Flint, Mich., turned off the electricity in a woman’s home because she was one cent short when she paid her $1,662.08 bill.

Jacqueline Williams said she was left in the dark until “I went down there, paid my penny, and got a receipt.”

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Hungarian Laszlo Aranyi is nearing his 60th birthday and wanted to prove he’s still as strong as a horse – so he pulled a 924-pound carriage 430 miles, from Zahony to Szombathely.

“The only hard part was getting up the hills and balancing the carriage on the way down,” he said of his 22-day tour de force.

So Aranyi still has brawn. But brains? It sounds horse senseless to us.

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Here’s a woman with true grit. She’s been eating small stones every day for the past 70 years.

Granny Liu, 79, of the small Chinese village of Guofu, chomps on stones the way most people munch on peanuts. And the harder they are, the tastier, she says.

Her diet has caused only one problem. The stones wear down her teeth, and she’s had to replace her dentures three times.

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Seasonal residents of hurricane-battered Florida have a new problem to contend with – their homeowners’ associations have started to bar them from putting up storm shutters while they’re away during the summer.

They’ve been told the shutters are unattractive, and have been threatened with fines.

Those affected are enraged. Noted one, “We’re talking about something that takes time to put up, takes time to put down. It’s protecting the biggest investment of your life.”