Joe Boschi has a huge skylight in his Austinburg Township cottage along the Grand River.

Problem is, the two huge trees that created this skylight partially block the view.

“At least I don’t have to clean the windows,” says Boschi, 78, who somehow maintains his sense of humor despite a room-sized hole in his roof.

Joe’s house, a simple frame cottage that he paid $7,500 for 17 years ago, was nearly destroyed when a walnut tree and an ash tree, each about 30 inches in diameter, came crashing down Memorial Day weekend. Boschi, who was away from his house at the time, has been surviving with the fallen trees in his living room ever since.

“I got a problem and a half,” Boschi says the hole funnels the rain into what’s left of his house.

Boschi calls the resultant lifestyle “pioneering.” His living space has been reduced to an 8-by-10-foot bedroom the trees spared, although its roof leaks and the floor is constantly wet. His bed, compact refrigerator and television are crammed into the room.

The house lacks running water, except for the garden hose that draws river water for flushing the toilet. Once a month, he drives to Chardon and buys 48 gallons of bottled water for drinking and cooking.

“Mostly, all I eat is breakfast, cold cereal,” he says. “I love cold cereal.”

His shower is at the Flying J, where he pays $5 to use the service. His closet is several lines strung between trees in the backyard. For a hot meal, he eats at the truck stop’s buffet. He heats with an oil furnace attached to the outside of the house; his bedroom heat is supplied by a small space heater. His one form of entertainment is the color television in his bedroom.

“It’s O.K. for a man to live here, but not for a woman or children. They could not stand to stay here,” he says.

The house has a phone and electricity, although displaced power lines hang haphazardly in the room that once did double duty as workshop and living room.

Destructive visits by nature are nothing new for Boschi. His property sustained heavy flood damage in 2005 and again this spring, when the river spilled 3 inches of water into his house. Boschi says he drove his Buick Century to a motel parking lot at Route 45 and Interstate 90 and slept and lived in it until the flood subsided.

Meanwhile, the wet ground no longer could keep its grip on the massive walnut tree’s roots and, nudged by the ash tree leaning against it, it crashed into the house.

Earlier this year, high winds sent two other trees crashing to the ground and into a mobile home Boschi uses for storage.

To add insult to his suffering, while Boschi was away at a family reunion in Pennsylvania, thieves helped themselves to his personal belongings, the house left unsecured by the hole in the roof.