Action Shot of Me Fixing the Door.
Last year, when we moved into our new house, we discovered that the door-hinge to my older son’s bedroom was perpetually loose. Tightening the screw would buy you two or three days of unhindered door use, but it’d slowly droop back to its former loosened state over time. Mrs. Campbell asked me to fix it so, I immediately leaped into action and put it on my list. Not my “To Do” list, but rather on my special list–the list where I park things I either don’t want or don’t know how to do. The list where I hope to out stubborn the problem through inaction.
Now, fast forward fourteen months later. The door has won. It hangs from the wall shedding desolation, like a scenic element in a haunted house at a High School Production of “Scooby Doo! The Musical”. So I do what every red-blooded American man does, I look up how to fix it with google, then confidently explain how I’m going to fix it as if the knowledge comes with the “Y” chromosome itself:
- Remove door
- Drill out the stripped holes to 3/8″
- Insert 3/8″ dowels liberally smeared with wood glue
- Allow 1-2 hours dry time
- Drill pilot holes for the screws as appropriate to the size of the screw
- Replace hinge
- Replace door
Step 1, easy.
Step 2, easy. Well, with step 2 I made an executive decision. The middle screw was holding. I couldn’t pull it out with my fingers like the other two, but it wouldn’t snug down. So I decided to just replace the 1″ screw with a 2 1/2″ screw. This made sense to me, however, if Bob Villa or Norm Abram ever reads this, please know I am ashamed and I express regret to your people–carpenters, I mean.
Step 3. Huh. These dowels seem a little looser than I expected. Well, fuck it. Damn the torpedoes and all that. I smear the dowels with glue and push them in. But they’re really loose. So I start loading wood glue onto my finger and shoving it at the seam between the dowel and the door frame hoping to pack glue down into the spaces. Now I walk out to the kitchen past my wife who is looking on with horror, I, holding my glue-caked hands like a surgeon who has just scrubbed in except I am heading toward the sink.
Step 4 & 5. Two hours pass. I drill the holes without much drama.
Step 6. So far, so good.
I totally pimped your door.
Step 7. I hang the door and replace the pin in the top hinge. But the bottom hinge won’t go into place. So, holding the door with one hand and the hinge pin with the other, I call out to the living room “bring me my mallet”. If you ever want to frighten you wife, call out in desperation “bring me a mallet!”–it gets their attention. The first tap didn’t do much. But, after I called it a “no-good son-of-a-bitch” and lightly tapped it again, it popped into place then back out the other side. So then, I was all “come on baby, you know I love you”. At this point, I was able to jockey it into place with my bare hands. You’ve got to know how to talk to these things. I finished the job and, triumphal, came out to the living room and said “Son, I totally pimped your door.”
I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a teenager give you that look that says “I wish more than anything, that I was a test-tube baby right now”, but that is the look I got. So, then I doubled down: “son, I want you to tell your friends that your dad totally pimped your door hinge, ok?” So he got up, and exercised the door hinge by seeking refuge in his room, shutting the door behind him. I was like “THIS MOMENT OF SOLITUDE WAS BROUGHT TO YOU BY YOUR DAD, THE DOOR HINGE WHISPERER!”
What I’m saying is teenagers embarrass easily, father’s jobs are thankless, and door hinges respond to verbal abuse.
Happy Father’s Day to all!
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“Sexy Construction Worker” image ©Dario Lo Presti/Dreamstime.com