get this party started
I realized, after one week in the new house, that I adapt quickly to all kinds of living situations. And this could be a problem.Because if I don’t mind living in an unfixed fixer – if I don’t mind the falling ceiling tiles and the bare bulbs and the quirky shower – I could just live this way indefinitely. The furnace quit yesterday and I just thought, Good thing I like it cold.
But the truth is that the house needs some love, and it needs it now. Entropy already has a head start of several years. If I don’t get going I’m going to wake up one morning in a mossy glen that was once my living room.
So Saturday morning I turned a wall of the back porch into a giant calendar, and I plotted out projects from now through May. For each week I have Indoor Projects and Outdoor Projects and Things To Get And Learn, and each week has a project in green that’s the Big Weekend Project. Each project is on a little card held up with a tack so they can all move around.
The first project chose itself. Early last week I was rushing out to work when I discovered that I was locked in. Not a typo: locked in. The front door catch just spun and spun. Since then I’ve kept the door unlocked whenever I’m home – which, let me tell you, is not really what my particular flavor of Home Alone Paranoia needs.
First I had to choose door hardware. Door hardware is one of those things I’ve interacted with every day of my life but never given second thought to. It comes in a lot of finishes and styles. I knew that I needed a new main latch set – because that’s what was broken. And I soon figured out that I needed a deadbolt – because my door didn’t have one, and because I’d told my home insurance company that it did. I had not meant to lie: at the beginning of the door adventure, I actually knew so little about door hardware that I thought I did have a deadbolt.
Door hardware comes in two varieties: Cheap N’ Weak, and Expensive & Sturdy. I tried to find something at the lower end of the second type. This meant it wasn’t in a finish I particularly liked (but was, at least, not the mysteriously predominant Polished Brass), and it wasn’t the style I liked - the vertical-bar handles that look good on old houses but that are, apparently, some sort of door status symbol, and priced accordingly.
Being new to the world of home improvement, and therefore dangerously naive, I first removed all of the old door hardware even though this was not necessary for installing the deadbolt. In my pitifully optimistic brain, the plan went like this. (1) Remove old latch. (2) Install deadbolt. (3) Install new latch. (4) Dust hands off on jeans and go out for a drink to celebrate completion of Official First Home Improvement Project.
Then I realized that I’d purchased the wrong sized hole saw for the new deadbolt. (You won’t need to do any drilling, the very nice and very wrong man at the store had assured me.) So I left my house – not only unlocked, but with three gaping holes in the door where the locks might have been – to run to the store.
Except it was Sunday afternoon. Easter Sunday. Half an hour and three hardware stores later, I was ready to proceed. I drilled a big hole through the solid oak door. Half way the saw started binding, so I had to come from the other direction. The resulting two-part hole was what I like to call “close enough.”
Then I drilled the smaller hole for the bolt. Then I drilled the hole the bolt goes into. Then I chiseled out the depression for the strike plate. Then I chiseled out the depression for the back plate. Then, fumbling with half a dozen greasy unlabeled nearly-identical metal discs that absolutely must be lined up in the appropriate order and orientation, I snapped together the mechanism. And then it was dark. So I slapped duct tape over the lingering holes and called it a day.
And it took about eight times longer than I’d estimated, and probably a locksmith could have done it in fifteen minutes. But it was awesome. Now I not only have a deadbolt, but know exactly how it works, and what it looks like inside. And every time I unlock my door I get to think about it.
And if this project is any indication, this is exactly the sort of meaningful connection I will have with my whole house, when it’s all finished, in approximately twenty six years.
posted by tortaluga @ 4:17 PM
1 Comments:
I hope on that giant calendar you have some big cards that say SWINGING; swinging is a great way to celebrate nearly anything...especially dead bolt assembly :)
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