We need, most simply, some work on our door. We thought, gee, we need some ventilation in the kitchen. What about a half light vent door, qv, which would solve everything.
Found one, in budget, at Home Depot. Ordered same. 30.00 for guy to come out and measure. Ok, he can’t come until our regular dinnertime—turns up an hour late, our supper is fresh bread, so, y’know, that was annoying. But we coped. He says he needs to do a little trim at the top.
Well, we get the call to come in and pay for the door. And it’s 300.00 to get this guy to remove the frame and door, 20.00 to get him to haul the old door away, 20 more dollars to have him nail our trim back on, and 65.00 to cut that top opening a little higher.
We walked. They had the order written up, and charged us too much for the door and claimed they couldn’t change it because they have a DOS system for orders and it can’t be changed. So we told them, in essence, “Bye. We don’t appreciate this. And we’re going.”
We went over to Lowe’s, who also have a door (different brand)—and they can’t trim the inch off the top, because it requires a work permit and they don’t do that. If we do the trim, they can do it.
Well, heck, say I, why don’t we just hang a new door in the old frame? Why don’t we get a wooden door and trim it until it fits? I helped my dad plane ordinary wooden slab doors until they fit, back in the day. I got to where I was pretty good at it. I’ve drilled holes for the lock mechanism. This is not rocket science.
Now, I am informed, a door has to flex in its mounting, hence the doors now coming pre-hung, and needing a larger hole than you would think and the shims make it fit—you know the suction a door can get in the whole house when it slams: it does need that flex. But—the extant frame is up, and works. The hinges, yes, can be unmounted from the extant door and (doh!) put on the new one. What we really need is a door, not the whole thing. And we don’t need a 400.00 handyman to mount an under-200.00 door.
So we conclude that we should go to a place called The Ugly Duck, which sells distressed, overstock, odd lots and whatnot lumber, doors, windows, flooring. It’s a very bare bones warehouse which buys cheap and sells raw stuff, and if we can get a halflight vent door either pre-hung or not, we’re going to do it ourselves.
Meanwhile we’re tracking a mysterious crackle in the kitchen wiring, which we may have isolated to the heater in the bichir tank on the kitchen counter—that one has us spooked. We have sequentially unplugged the coffee pot, the cats’ water fountain, the tank pump, the left and right Sea Swirl water movement rotation devices in the marine tank, and we have now turned off the air filters, trying to track this down. We’re afraid to leave the house for any prolonged time until we can get this one solved.
I hope you get the crackle resolved post haste, so y’all are safe and feel so.
Sympathies on the door. I wish I had good handyman skills (and the eyesight for them). But hey, unfinished or scratch-and-dent or surplus, why not? Stain and varnish that door, or paint and seal, and voilà. — Looking about the “half light vent” door, though I think I get the concept.
Hahaha, no, Smokey, you may not lay your head down on the keyboard. Yes, I’ll pet you. Lazy hedonist cat! :grins:
Where is the crackle originating, and when does it occur? Is it from an outlet or switch that can be easily replaced? Intermittent shorts are the most aggravating of all to track and repair, not to mention being nervous-making!
I agree with “I refuse to pay exorbitantly for unnecessary work I neither need nor want.” I’ve replaced doors before, and I’m sure you and Jane can also, as handy as you’ve shown yourselves. Work permit for one cut with a saw?!? Measure twice, cut once, and have at with the circular saw! Use the old door as the top of a potting table — $20 to haul away, pfui. Also look into your local Habitat for Humanity ReStore shop for good overstock and secondhand hardware and home improvement supplies. Ours has enough granite countertop scraps for me to put in an entire mosaic counter in my kitchen @ under $100.
Something is arcing. Cut the power and secure the screws to the wiring inside all the outlets and switches. That may eliminate the problem. It’s usually a loose connection.
THat’s a very good point. If the heater isn’t it, we’ll check all the wires.
Oh, dear. Electrical things make me nervous. Hope sainteyebeat has the right idea.
The door thing…uh oh. I need both a new storm door and a new regular door. Haven’t had a chance to get the estimate for installing. Hmmm…although I can say I won’t pay squat for hauling away…we have a “heavy trash pickup” by the local sanitation dept. twice a year here, the old door can wait until the fall pickup date. But installation charges, I can’t avoid. I am useless at stuff like this.
Well, we tried the Ugly Duck, but they didn’t have the half-light-vent we wanted.
So…we went and got the one at Lowe’s, got it in the Forester, got the hardware and got it home. We couldn’t lift it, or we could, but we couldn’t walk with it. So we took the door out of the frame, and just took the frame in. We’ll reassemble before installing it.
Turns out if Mr. Expensive Expert had stuck a pocket knife into the crack between molding and door, he’d have found out there was free room up there, but no, he’d rather charge us 65.00 extra for enlarging the opening. We decided to use the frame minus threshold, but when we pulled the old frame, we found room. We measured.
1/4 inch too short an opening. Plenty of room on the sides. So we’d take the threshold off and get a new flat threshold plate to join the Pergo kitchen floor to the peel-and-stick mudroom steps in that…doorway…
Hmmm. Pergo is exactly 1/4 thick. If we chisel out the Pergo, to that limit, we can fit the whole prehung frame into that opening!
Piece of cake! We do the trim of the Pergo, get the frame ready to tap in, then put the door in, make sure it’s squared away, then tap in, put the molding on, install the hardware, and we have our door!
Eushu of course helped, with Jane whacking away at boards and ripping things loose. That kitten knows no fear—except when she opened a door he didn’t know was to the outside. He freaked. I bear the scars, since I was holding him at the time.
But the door job is mostly done. Now if we can just find that crackle. We think it’s the tank heater, leaking and evaporating water on its coils.
At least we have gotten the door job nearly done —a security issue—and saved more than we ended up spending. 400.00 to hang a door. Ha! We are very pleased with ourselves!
If you go with just a door, watch the hinges. I’ve done enough doors to know nothing is ever simple with them! Different doors have different hinge shapes and different hinge locations so they probably WONT simply match up. You might have to dig out around the hinge to get it to fit right. Then there is the screw pattern… ugh.
Pre-hung might SEEM more complicated, but if your house is standard construction, not so much. Especially if your current trim goes right back up without having to add fills strips. I’ve had to trim the bottom on doors, its not so bad if you can get away with just trimming the bottoms of the case then the door itself. A good sturdy straight edge and clamps to guide a circular saw work really well to get a nice line.
And… after the Feliway, I have to ask, do you have one of those plug-in rodent chaser things anywhere? When the house is quiet, I can hear mine, and I wandered around several times trying to find the funny noise before I realized what it was.
Lol, no rodent-chaser. We gots cats! Ysabel might regard mice as roommates, but not this new little guy! No mouse nor bug would have a chance with him, even now.
Doors do not in any way, shape or form need to flex. The proper way to hang a door involves long screws through the hinges and jamb and into the actual structure of the house. No flex. Period. A door or jamb that flexes will fail.
Phil Brown
Those, we got! We’re between two studs and under a lintel in the wall, so we will be looking up step by step how-to-hang prehung doors tonight.
The crackle could be comming from around your Marine fish tank. I had several for 20 years and salt creep from the tank would always migrate to the electrical fixtures. The salt and very little moisture counducts well. I got lots of shocks from it!!!!lol
Glad the door is working out. A badly hung one can be an instrument of torture for the house inhabitants.
Electricity is the one utility I will not mess with. It scares me, mostly because I can’t see it. Fortunately I know a guy who does excellent work and is reasonably priced. AND he understand the ins and outs of my kilns. Hopefully he will not move away or anything. 😉 I hope you find the problem post haste. It’s the little difficult to trace things that are craze inducing. ( I have a *very slow* leak in my vehicle’s power steering that we have not been able to find. It’s become easier to put in a few tablespoons of fluid every month or so than spending a lot of money to find it.)
We have gone from having kittehs who raised an eyebrow and sneered at the suggestion that they track down a mouse to three enthusiastic hunters. (Although I think Aloysius would rather have pasta than mouse.) Be aware of the potential for…..uhhh…….parasites if you have hunters. Mice can spread many diseases. 8)
SmartCat: Ah yes, steering fluid leaks: we developed (or found) one just after Thanksgiving and were quoted multiple hundreds of dollars to try to track it down, so we are doing the same as you, and topping the fluid off every once in a while; That and parking with the nose of the van uphill. I found the leak when it was nose “down” and spotted a funny puddle of whitish liquid mixed with rainwater under the right, front bumper.
Congrats with the door, CJ & Jane! We just developed/found a roof leak in our kitchen this morning when I took the cardboard container of salt out of the cupboard by the outside wall to add a tablespoon of salt to my incipient bread dough and wondered why it had beads of moisture on top… and a damp bottom… like other containers on that side of the cupboard and on the shelf above… and the top shelf… and oh dear, look at the spongy ceiling. The builder/roofer we have been speaking with about reshingling the house and some other maintenance jobs can’t come quick enough (but has other jobs and a much-needed vacation lined up first). Luckily he gave some advice over the phone today that it the leak may be along the stove vent pipe near there on the roof. We’ll see if we can cluge patch it for a bit (expanding insulation foam is a wonderful thing) and he might be able to squeeze in a caulking patch ater in the week before he heads off to lie on a beach if we can’t work it out ourselves.
Being homeowners can be so fun: we’ve known the roof needed work for a while but a pregnant raccoon thinking a den inside our attic was the way to go if only she could tear up these pesky shingles in her way this April really added to the pressure. She was seen back on the roof by the kitchen door a few nights ago….
Oh, joy.
Lemme tell you what I know about electricity: it works a lot like garden hoses. It flows, it can be split, it is ideally directional down the line, you want to use a gasket (insulation) so it stays put in its ‘hose’ and if you compromise the line you’ve got a faceful, a flood, or a mess. Completely ‘dry’ is the only way to go, and your ‘hose’ needs to be rated for the kind of pressure you want to put on it, ie, you wouldn’t connect your garden hose to the fire hydrant, and you don’t want something that will blow out (melt) your connection. You also don’t try to put a nozzle on if the hose is not cut off at the spigot (breaker box). If you think of it as water in a hose, it’s real easy to figure the basics.
I love raccoons except near my koi pond.
I did find the Scarecrow water frightener while looking for door stuff.
We had to give up on koi… dang racoons got way too good at catching them in the shallows once they were a decent size. The feeder comets we replaced them with reproduce quite well enough to overpopulate the pond!
I think my first reply on this blog, several years ago now, was my frustration with raccoons’ depredations on my small water garden. Perhaps if I put my goldfish back out in it, they would leave my roof alone. Ha! Full frontal blasts of garden hose only push them back 30 or so feet temporarily and they mostly watch me as I lob and miss rocks at them (and then come out to investigate the stone when I stop). I felt morally very satisfied, though, when I chased off Mom-to-Be Raccoon from the railing of our back porch (she was climbing down it from the roof where I had heard her) with a full-throated yell in her face. I always wondered how loud and deep I could be if I dropped any veneer of manners and just roared. It wasn’t very civil but it was very fulfilling (though I got a sore throat).
Lol. They have thumbs, you know.
And as others have said, the crackle could be pretty serious. Arcing makes that sound and arcing is very bad. I’d get it checked out. I’ve build many things in my life and I always call the electrician.
Phil Brown
I think we have isolated the crackle to an obviously compromised fishtank heater: they’re notorious, and this one shows evidence of leakage. Usually they kill the fish when they go like this, but we’re lucky.
Re the raccoons: They are stubborn, smart, curious, tenacious, and tough critters. You need to convince them you’re serious, to evict them. Or just convince them you’re a raving lunatic and possibly raccoon-icidal. Yell and make *lots* of noise. Bang on things. Yes, this worked to evict two raccoons from my parents’ attic, when the house was empty. I pulled down the attic staircase from the ceiling, made plenty of noise with the spring of same, climbed demonstratively and loudly…but that didn’t entirely discourage them. So up in the attic I went, and *yelled* at the top of my lungs for them to get the heck out of *my* attic, or I’d start charging them rent. A bit more yelling, roaring, stomping, banging on the rafters. Much chittering from the raccoons in consternation. Roughly translated, I think it was something like, “What the heck is *his* problem? He’s not using the place for anything. He’s nuts! Let’s get the heck outta here, this guy’s gonna bust something! I don’t feel like picking a fight with a crazy human. BYE! Dang crazy neighbors!” And that was the last I heard of them. Heheheheh. — I didn’t want to hurt them, didn’t want them to charge me, and figured it was my best chance, short of trapping them or risking them — or me.
Or if you prefer, try a super-soaker water gun, one of those huge things kids play with.
Or…try a slingshot, either the Y-shaped American variety or the ancient “whirl the sling around your head and hope you don’t konk your own skull, David versus Goliath” variety. Or whatever other non-lethal but effective deterrent you might prefer. — Or capture in a safe cage and relocate them to parts more distant, terra incognita, *far* out into the country. (I mean, you don’t want ’em to hop a bus or hop a freight train and arrive back on your doorstep, exasperated at your rudeness and ready to have you for supper.
Hey, I’m a live and let live sort of guy. I respect raccoons. But anything that wants to live on my property (or in my house!) needs to pay rent, or at least do some chores.
…Wait a minute, my cats don’t pay rent or do chores…ah well, they do contribute, sort of. …I’d better hope they don’t charge *me* rent. (I already do their chores…HEY!)
(Yes, I’m talking about you, you big mess of a cat.)
(He just came up for attention. With the other one right behind. Convenient timing. Almost…too convenient…. Hmm, what was that about telepathy and teleportation of feline persons again?)