Adventures In Home Improvement
28 Jul 2008I am not a handy person. Manual labor has never been my strong point. Thus, our recent and current renovation has been a comedy of errors.
Everything has taken an order of magnitude longer than I thought it would. What was meant to be a couple of weekends of work has snowballed into a couple of months of work.
Things still aren’t quite done, and the summer is well on it’s way to being over.
The latest adventure was shaving down the bathroom door. Let me set the stage…
You see, we had new flooring put in. We ripped up the old floor, which was a berber carpet. I am here to tell you that if you think that you like berber carpet, trust me, you don’t. One tiny little thread in the carpet gets snipped, or torn, or bitten through by a pet, and the whole carpet is lost.
Anyway, we had someone come in and put down a new laminate floor. I love it. Then we picked up the transition pieces that go from one type of floor to another. The problem there is that these pieces have a certain amount of height. In our case just under 1cm at the highest point. And, well, sadly, there were no transitions between the carpet and the other types of floor. They had just been glued right up against the other types of flooring.
This meant that we had a 1mm gap under the bathroom door, and we needed an 11mm gap to account for the new transition piece. So, I go out to the local Home Depot. I pick up a Jig Saw (because I know I can’t cut it straight with my little hand saw, and it would take forever anyway). While I’m there I decide I need some clamps. My plan was to draw the line on the door that I needed to cut along. Then I clamped down a spare piece of laminate as a guide that I could push the saw along. Unfortunately I picked up the cheap clamps. The vibrations from the saw caused the clamps and the guide board to shift ever so subtly. By the time I got to the other side of the door, I was out a full inch. There’s no way to go back and fix that kind of a problem.
So I grabbed the door from the spare bedroom (thankfully all of our interior doors are the same) and I cut down the bottom on that one (not relying on any guide board, just the line I had drawn, so it is the tiniest bit crooked near one end), and put it on the bathroom. So now, instead of spending an extra $10 on clamps, I’ll be spending an extra $35 dollars on a new door (or two…), or maybe we’ll decide that it doesn’t need a door anymore.
Of course a new door, means more painting as well… just when I thought we were almost done with it.