Wednesday, April 18, 2018

Unsqueaking the Door

Sometimes a very little thing can be a big bother over time.   The door to our bathroom squeaked.   It started small with just a little squeak from time to time.   Then it went to squeaking all of the timebut it wasn’t loud.    Eventually it became haunted house creaky, squeaky noisy.   I’m not sure if I would have paid attention to it so much if it hadn’t been I didn’t want to wake my husband up in the middle of the night.

It must be going on a year now that I would tiptoe quietly into the bathroom and try to shut the door in just the right way so as to prevent the door from squeaking too loudly.   I tried all sorts of things: going slowly, opening the door quickly, pushing down on the knob as I swung it and opening it only partially so I could get in and out.

The squeak got louder and more difficult to avoid.   The thing is, I knew what to do to stop the squeak.   Remembering the next morning what I had had good intentions of doing in the middle of the night was the problem.    That, or when it came to mind I was doing other things—or being lazy—and it didn’t get done.

This morning both remembered and wasn’t being lazy.   I went to the garage to get the graphite power, a hammer and screwdriver.   I asked my husband to help me for five minutes and watched him follow me into the bathroom with a quizzical look on his face as I carried my tools.   I had him hammer out the door pins one at a time and I added graphite to them.   And then the job was finished.

It was fast, it wasn’t hard, and we had had everything we needed to get the job done in the garage.   Now the door is silent and I can sneak in and out of the bathroom as many times as I please at night, without being fearful of waking my husband up if I sneeze or trip or…who am I kidding, he never wakes up.   But just in case he does, it won’t be on account of a squeaky bathroom door.

The Big Boy Update:  My son came home from camp today and was much less messy and dirty than I had expected.   Last year, his kindergarten class made much more or a wreck of their clothes and shoes.   This year he didn’t even have one pair of shoes drenched and grimy.   He told us he had a good time and has been singing campfire songs all day.  While he was there the temperature fluctuated significantly.  His evaluation of the temperature during the three-day trip was, “normal, ice cube and sunny”.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  Rarely does my daughter sleep without her brother in the same room, and the last two nights she didn’t want to go to sleep alone at bedtime.   Last night she asked if we could leave the door to their room open.   This morning she got up and was surprised, saying, “I didn’t know you were going to leave the door open all night.”

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