Door Repair

I drove over to St. Johns today to help younger son replace the lock on his front door. The door has been not-quite-right for a while now, and the key finally sheared off in the lock. Extracting the broken key was an exercise in futility, so he elected to just replace the entire fixture. I get over there and the lady of the house is making French toast which we ate Romanian style, which means pouring a puddle of honey on a plate, then tearing off pieces of French toast and dipping them in the honey. Wonderful.

Coffeed and toasted we tackled the door. The old latch assembly comes out easy enough, the Makita makes short work of the dozen or so screws holding it all together, but now we see the real problem: the door is not square in the frame. There is a big (quarter inch gap) at the top on the hinge side and the other edge overlaps the frame by maybe a sixteenth of an inch. It's weird because hinges don't seem to be bent and they all seem to be fully seated in the respective places. The only thing I can think of to do is to chisel out the frame where the top hinge goes. We shave off a bit, but it's not enough. I think we ended up taking about an eighth of an inch off and that brought it into line.

The screws in the hinges were only about a half of an inch long, and some of the ones in the middle hinge were stripped. We replaced them all with some two and half inch long screws. You might think that the longer screws would have fixed the problem, but no. We tried that first and it didn't help. Thank goodness for electric screwdrivers. Can you imagine driving two dozen, two and half inch screws in by hand, and then taking them back out and driving them in again, not once, but two or three times? Mr. Makita got a workout.

Once we got the alignment problem solved, it was a simple matter to install the new latch. Oh, and look, the deadbolt slides home without making any fuss. Means we didn't have to get out the Dremel tool and grind the latch plate, which was what I was expecting to do.

Stanley Wood Chisels

We had one old, ragged chisel. When we ran out of screws we took a jaunt over to Ace Hardware. I used this opportunity to buy some Stanley wood chisels and a Milwaukee pocket knife. I don't really have any need to buy tools anymore, but I still have a hard time every time I go to Home Depot and I have to walk by the tool department. Tool lust is a disease and it is only through tremendous self-discipline that I am able to keep from drooling and and pulling out my charge card.

Milwaukee Pocket Knife

I have a pocket knife, but it was grown dull and Jeeves has been lax about sharpening it. I expect I shall have to speak sharply to him. Anyway, I had an excuse to buy a knife, and I indulged it.