Doors

August 16, 2019: A bright, new door on our old shed.

Last week, on August 14th, my son Jacob made another of his surprise visits and spent a few days with us. Five days earlier, when I posted pictures on Facebook of the wasp nest in our broken-down shed door, I had jokingly asked Jacob if he wanted to drive up and put in a new door for me. Since nearly every door in the Mesa house had been trashed by our squatters and required replacement, Jacob has become well-versed in the art of door installation. 

While I really did want him to replace the door for me eventually, I was just joking about it at this point. However, unknown to me, his brother Dylan took the ball and ran with it, calling Jacob often and urging him to come up and see us. So Jacob and one of his roommates, Antonio, arrived at Dylan and Jake's place last Wednesday and called to ask me what I was doing. Surprise!

I love it when Jacob's car is in my driveway (dark blue 2019 VW Tiguan).

My life is complete when I get to be with all three of my children at the same time. We got to have dinner together two nights in a row, and it truly warmed my mother-heart. On Wednesday, Jacob made us all Jalapeno Popper Chicken Casserole, which was delicious, with a big salad prepared by the boys' sister, Sarah. On Thursday, Mark grilled steaks and chicken, while I made buttered green beans and steamed asparagus/chipotle mayonnaise on the side.

Jacob also spent one morning hiking a trail out near Heber-Overgaard with Dylan and Jake. On his last night in town he spent time with Sarah and Chris at their house, where they enjoyed visiting and a few hands of their favorite card games.

The old door removed from the laundry room

(more of a laundry "closet," actually).

In the midst of the good times, there were the doors to be dealt with. Yes, doors, in the multiple. I decided that, as long as we were doing this, I wanted my laundry room door replaced, as well. It had already been replaced once, after the original door fell apart, and then the second door fell apart after a few years, too. I'm not even exaggerating. 

The old door was removed and set out on the porch, 

damaged and punctured with multiple holes.

Part of the problem was the fact that both of those doors had hollow cores. Having a houseful of kids, who (like most kids) were impatient and always in a hurry, meant the door was often thrown open hard enough to hit the little shelf on the wall beside the door, making an ever-widening hole in the door. When I installed little stoppers on the hinges to prevent the door from opening so wide, the rubber-tipped stoppers simply pushed more holes into the thin layer of wood!

The other part of the problem is my old wood-foundation house (44 years old this year), which constantly shifts with changes in the weather. Doors that close and latch nicely in the dry, cold winters may not do so well during the warm, humid monsoons of summer, and vice versa. These shifts didn't really affect the laundry room door in the early years, when the kitchen flooring was the original very-thin linoleum squares installed by our predecessors. However, when we put in thicker, sturdier flooring, bringing the floor up closer to the bottom edge of the door, the shifts caused the bottom of the door to sometimes drag across the flooring. It didn't take too many seasons for the friction to tear the thin board off the back of the door, which grew progressively worse as the now-loose press-board scraped across the floor each time it was opened. After going through this process with two consecutive doors, I said, "Enough!"

My new laundry room door before the trim went on.

So this time I made sure to purchase a door with a solid core. To my surprise, it cost less than $10 more than a hollow core, which was more than worthwhile to me! Jacob and Antonio had their work cut out to make the door swing freely and evenly above the flooring of my lopsided house, and then getting the latch of the doorknob to line up correctly with the strike plate was a chore, but in the end they had it working perfectly.

I LOVE my beautiful new laundry room door!

I had the guys tear out the existing baseboards before they put up the trim. When we painted over the wood paneling many years ago (a house with all-brown walls is too dreary to me), I wanted to do the kitchen in a cheery yellow, but we were so poor in those years that I couldn't afford any more paint to do this one wall in a different color. Instead, I had to use the leftover blue paint from the living room and hall to paint this kitchen wall. It's been okay--certainly better than one more brown wall--but now I'm ready to do more painting in the next few months, and this wall will be yellow when we finish! The door and trim will also be painted (white), and we'll replace the baseboards at that time.

I can't even express how much I love my new laundry room door. It's so solid, opens so smoothly, and closes with such a satisfying "thunk" instead of a hollow sound. I couldn't ask for better!

This eyesore on the shed desperately needed replacing!

(Cleaning out the shed is on my Sept agenda, when it's cooler!)

Once the laundry room door was completed on Thursday, it was time to turn our attention to the shed door. It's the same door that was there when we bought the house twenty-six years ago (1993), and it wasn't in great shape even then. 

Again, it was a hollow core door, and the harsh elements of monsoonal summer rains, snowstorms, and below-zero winter temperatures took their toll on the outer shell of the door, leaving the inner honeycomb of cardboard and thin wood slats exposed. It became a perfect nest for critters like wasps and spiders, which came to a head two weeks ago when Mark was attacked and stung by wasps nesting in the door. The door-dwellers were toast after a visit from pest control but, clearly, the only permanent solution was a new door.

Jacob works on removing the old trim and door while I shop for doors.

While Jacob took down the old door and ripped out the old trim, Antonio and I checked out both Lowe's and Home Depot (right across the street from each other in our small town). Home Depot won out, since they had a wider selection of the doors I was looking for. This time, not only did I go for a solid core, but I also made sure it was a steel door. No critters were going to take up residence in this door!

The trashed old shed door is off!

The installation of the shed door presented its own problems. The biggest issue was that the door was too tall for the opening, by an inch or more. 

This is one of the problems we found with homes built in the 1970s, compared to newer construction. Mark's grandma's house in Mesa (which I inherited and have spent a fortune repairing, after evicting the people who'd moved in after her death) was built in 1979, and several of the doors and cabinets we replaced were not the standard sizes now available. So, to avoid the outrageous costs of special-ordering the sizes needed, we learned to find creative solutions! 

The color I selected for the shed door was brighter than I expected!

Antonio and Jacob tackle the issue of the door being 2 inches too tall.

My house was built in 1975, and we found that the old shed door was a full 1.25 inches shorter than the standard 80-inch height. To make it work, first the guys chiseled out the thin particle-board flooring where it extended over the door step. That sheered off about a quarter-inch. Then they removed the aluminum threshold attached to the bottom of the new door frame and sawed off the ends of the left and right casings.

The guys work to make the door shorter so it will fit into the opening.

 It was a tight squeeze, but it worked! They got the door stabilized and securely attached, ready to be finished up. But the problems didn't end there, unfortunately.

Jacob installs the doorknob on the new shed door.

When it was time to install the hardware, the deadbolt went on easily but didn't line up with the strike plate. Again. Apparently, all the work to get the door fitted into its tight space had thrown off the overall alignment.

Time to get creative again! We all worked at chiseling out a larger space for the strike plate, so we could move it up. Once we got that in the right position, Antonio installed the doorknob, only to discover that the latch was upside-down. When he disassembled the knob to turn it over, the outer knob just fell off, ker-plunk! And it wouldn't go back on. It just kept sliding off.

Next, installing strike plates for deadbolt and doorknob.

By this time, it was late afternoon on Friday, and Jacob needed to head back home. I told him to just leave the hardware as it was. Mark has experience with installing doorknobs and deadbolts, so we'd deal with that later. Jacob and Antonio finished up getting the door trim on, which went smoothly, thankfully. Then they grabbed some lunch, loaded their stuff into the car, and headed down the mountain to Mesa just after 3:30.

It's always hard to see Jacob go, but I'm so grateful for all the hard work they did on my behalf. I love both doors!

Antonio and Jacob get the trim in place around the door.

Since then, Mark has taken apart the shed door's hardware and packaged it up, and we returned it to the place of purchase to exchange for a new deadbolt-and-doorknob set. Sometime today or tomorrow (his days off), Mark will install them. Hopefully it will all go well on the first try. Fingers crossed!