In converting our home office to my son’s new bedroom, I made the decision to upgrade the door to a more interesting raised panel door. How hard can replacing a door be? It’s a piece of wood on metal hinges. Just in case, I made a preemptive call to the Cavalry and enlisted my father-in-law’s assistance for the day. Surely, two reasonably intelligent adults should be able to handle a door replacement. During an earlier trip to Home Depot, I learned that manufactured doors come in nice even sizes like 30 or 32 inches wide. We measured the old door and found it to be just under 30 inches, 29 11⁄16” to be exact. Knowing there were no 29 11/16” doors at Home Depot, I logically concluded doors must be like ceramic tiles or McDonald’s hamburger patties. Doors, tiles, and hamburger patties must start out a standard size and then are reduced in the cooking process. What cooking process a door goes through I wasn’t sure, but somehow I had equated a new door to a quarter pounder.
We bought the door and wouldn’t you know it? My new 30 inch door was exactly 30 inches wide; it had not lost a fraction of an inch in the cooking process. (It turns out there was no cooking process.) After trimming the door to the proper width, we realized that the door was also too long. We could get the door on the hinges, but it wouldn’t close because it was caught on the carpet. Familiar with my wife’s high standards, I knew she would want the door to operate in both the open and closed positions. The only concern with cutting the length of the door was that today’s prefabricated doors are hollow. If you cut too much off one end, you risk hitting the hollow center. Shaving off incremental shims of door, we cut and refitted and cut and refitted. Still caught on the carpet. And then just like the number of licks to get to the center of a Tootsie Roll Pop, we hit the center of the door on our third pass. Except it wasn’t sweet and chocolatey. It was dark and barren and it’s emptiness mocked me. My carpentry efforts had produced a hollow door with the opening at the bottom.
I’ll save you the gory details, but in the end the door was successfully installed. While this story has a happy ending, it goes to show how home improvement is a tempting mistress. For whatever reason, I was predisposed to take on the labor, sweat, frustration, sawdust, and new tool expense of replacing a perfectly functional door with another perfectly functional door. Every night before bed, my son walks into his room and closes the door. It’s very cute. As we read a bedroom story, I admire the door to a degree I’m sure no one else will. As I shut off his light I can’t help but notice how the ceiling fan doesn’t match his new jungle-themed room. This white one looks like it belongs in an ice cream parlor; clearly we need a more tropically inspired ceiling fan. How hard can that be to replace?
