We discovered something recently at our house...we have a bathroom that you can't lock. We had a guest tell us this because someone walked in on him while he was washing his hands. We were all glad it was only his hands. I told him he just didn't see the locking pin and that yes, the doors could be locked. But he was right, you couldn't lock the doors.
The inner door to the shower and toilet room could be locked, only, oh dear, the locking pin was missing. And for some reason the person who helped us with the two outer doors (one to enter from the hall and one to enter from the bedroom) didn't think we needed locking doors.
We decided we needed to fix the situation. I called the hardware store and they told me to bring in the door lock itself so that they made sure to get the right parts. Today, I went in with a deconstructed door knob assembly and they got me the parts I needed to change out the innards to make the doors lockable. All I had to do was change the parts out when I got home.
Easy squeezie ice pop freezie, right? Not so fast. I don't have a problem with mechanical things, but this wasn't just a mechanical issue--there was a whole tolerance issue. Screws fit, but when you screw things in, they have to line up just right. For instance, when you shut a door, the tab that sticks out from the door has to fit into the hole in the door frame. You can have the door shut nicely, but if it's too tight in the door frame, you can't lock the door once it's shut. Four-letter words were used.
That tab that goes into the hole in the frame has to be facing the right direction. If it's curving in, the tab pushes in and the door clicks shut. If it's the other direction, the door slams into the frame and bounces back. I was convinced he'd given me lock chambers for left-swinging instead of right-swinging doors until I stumbled upon an adjustment feature after another several rounds of swearing.
There were about six other things that were more on the level of "lock installation finessing" as opposed to basic installation steps that caused the entire process of updating three doors to take far longer than I would have ever thought it would have. But it's done, and I'm a wiser person.
After I cleaned up my tools, I made a phone call to our trim carpenter who did our entire house. I don't call him often, but I think about him frequently because so many things in our house were hand crafted by him. I told him, "Wayne, I have been humbled by three little door knobs today. Can I just tell you again how amazing you are?"
The Big Boy Update: What does Donald say? My husband asked my son this earlier today and my son replied, (more than once), "aw, fooey."
The Tiny Girl Chronicles: Toddler Tea Party. I got an app on the iPad that I thought my daughter would like. It's a tea party in which you serve drinks and pieces of cake to three people (real or imaginary). It turns out my daughter does not like this app, she loves it. She plays it all the time and asks you if you want to have some birthday cake, or some more chocolate milk (she thinks the coffee is chocolate milk).
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