Bones said that to Captain Kirk more than once on the decks of the Enterprise. Well, my version goes something along the lines of "I'm a writer, Bethany, not a handyman."
See, before I became happily married I purchased my parents' house when they moved back to West Virginia. The kitchen of our lovely abode has a nook, wherein rests the washer and dryer. The nook was once covered by a pair of bi-fold doors. I crashed through them a few times when I was a kid and I'm sure they were replaced at least once. The track that the doors ran on was so worn that it wouldn't hold the doors in place as tight as it should and when the water heater busted a few months back, I tossed the doors so I could replace them with new ones.
Well, Bethany finally decided that today was the day those doors were going to be replaced since she has a baby shower for a friend scheduled here for Friday and she wanted the nook properly covered. A trip to Lowe's took care of purchasing the so called "easy to install" doors.
I'm writing this post at 11:45 p.m. We started at 9:30 p.m. with one five-minute break for a telephone call. That alone should be enough to tell you how this is going.
The first section of track went up without a problem. I then proceeded to screw piece on that holds the door on the bottom into the frame. Well, there's been so many holes drilled into that piece of wood that the piece just pulled right out of the door the first time we tried to use it. Oh, and did I mention that piece was warped when it came out of the bag? I didn't? Well it was.
So next we try to screw the door knob into the "pre-drilled" hole 36'' from the bottom of the door. That "pre-drilled" hole was a dimple that didn't even break the surface of the wood. So I pulled out my handy dandy battery powered drill and fixed that problem and spent the next ten minutes trying to get the screw to line up properly.
After a completely irritating few minutes of struggling with the door on the right side of the nook, we get it in place and it looks wonderful. Well, it's time to move on the left door and the phone rings. As Bethany talks to her sister I grab a snack and two Reese Easter Eggs and open up the next door.
Now, dear reader, I'm sure you're thinking that we'd worked out all the difficulties on the first door and the second one would be a breeze. You did think that, didn't you? Well, you probably jinxed us and that's why it took just as long, if not longer, on this door.
The first mistake was mine when I put the pivot piece on the wrong side over Bethany's protests that I was doing it wrong. The holes for the top pieces are pre-drilled and it takes a hammer to drive the pieces into place. It takes a pair of pliers and me hauling back on them and pushing against the door with my feet with everything I have to get the piece back out again. Once that's accomplished, we get the pieces in their proper places, align the track and screw it in and then see about hanging the door.
With only a moderate amount of frustration, we get that door in place. We close the door and then pull the one on the right shut so that we can stand back and admire our handiwork.
Except that the doors won't close. One door is striking the other on the bottom and there's a gap between them at the top. We spend at least 20 minutes trying to work this problem out and never manage to get anywhere. The doors are still hung, one closed and one a little more than 3/4 of the way closed.
After our workout tomorrow I'm going to ask Bryan to come up and see what we can do with it. I'm out of ideas.
I'm a writer, not a handyman.
No comments:
Post a Comment