The painters of our house were very diligent in painting every single thing, including a broken, battered, and flaked-up 60-year old screen door on the side of the garage. I attempted to buy a new door, and was elated to find a $20 screen door at Lowes. But got a kick in the face by reality when I found that it was 30 inches wide and the old door was 28 inches. There didn’t seem to be any option but re-build the old door because fitting in a 30 incher would entail completely re-building the frame, cutting asbestos shingles, and messing with lots of stuff that was good as it stands that it shouldn’t be messed with. (As our realty agent is fond of saying, “It wouldn’t be cost effective.”)

So when my Dad came to Katie’s graduation, Beth and I gave him a project: re-build the screen door. He took on the job with great enthusiasm, and had me probing the dark and dusty recesses of our garage for tools. Using a new chisel that I had bought and battered a few weeks previously, he levered away some of 3/4-inch pieces around the screen. It turned out to be more complicated than we had thought–and those complications continued to dog us as the project went on.

My dad chiseled out several 2 3/4 inch boards that we had thought were made up of 1/2 + 1 1/2 + 1/2 inch pieces, and we were left staring at one huge expanse of busted and stretched screen instead of several smaller pieces. Having a single screen was a great simplification, but it was the only simplification we encountered. The next step led to other complications. We set out to find tempered masonite at Lowes to replace the 2 3/4s, and got them to saw a 2′ x 4′ sheet into strips. The Lowes guy made his measurements with a very stubby pencil, and I had to make him re-do the cuts a couple of times to get pieces that were accurate to 1/16 inch. Geez! Even my lousy cutting skills are better than that.

Then armed with 2 3/4 inch masonite strips, some #17 wire brads and some skinny drill bits, my Dad got working again. I gave him my Dremel, my Craftsman drill and, just in case, my corded power drill, and left for my day job. When I came back from work he showed me that the two cordless drills had dead batteries, and the bit of the corded drill was too coarse to hold the fine drillbit! I turned the garage upside-down trying to find the chargers, without success (Had I thrown them way in the electronics recycling bin a month ago? Does Patrick have them?)

My dad stapled in the screen and completed the job as far as he could before returning home to California. As soon as he left, I went to Sears to buy a charger. But Sears doesn’t have my drill in stock any more. They don’t even have it in their computer! Same for the Dremel drill. Online, all I could find was an Amazon ad saying that they’d have Dremel chargers by July 23. Pah!

To nail in the masonite, we wanted to use wire nails that were just slightly larger than our finest drill bits (3/64 inch), and we needed a way to drill those 3/64 inch drill bits. I spent uncounted hours scouring hardware stores for a solution. I won’t even mention the name of the hardware store where the clerk hadn’t heard of masonite (“You want to drill through masonry?”. Then I pointed to all the masonite pegboards surrounding us in his store.) Finally I found 1/16-inch drillbits embedded in a hexagon prism base that would do fine in my coarse-bit corded drill. But the wire brad nails were exactly the same size as the bits, and I wanted to make them fit tightly. I finally decided to drill the 1/16 inch holes half way through the masonite, and let the olther half hold the nails. It worked fine.

Lots of drilling, nailing, sanding, puttying, sanding, primering, re-puttying, painting, re-sanding, and painting, and the door was ready to hang. I stuffed it into the door frame for the night and went to dinner. The next day I had to screw the door handle into the door just to be able to pry the door out of the frame. Our zealous painters had painted the frame so thick, the door was jammed in tight. More sanding, painting, and now the door is looking reasonably good.

(click)

Here’s my estimates of the costs:

Pre-painted molding pieces 4 1/2 x 6′ $6.00
Fibergass screen from an old yard sale $1.00
Gas to drive to Lowes $4.00
Tempered masonite 2′ x 4′ $5.00
Gas to Home Depot $4.00
Wire nails, screws, drill bits $9.00
Gas to Sears, Hdwe City, Bill’s Hdwe, etc $25.00
Paint (leftovers from house) 0.00
Labor (70 hours at $6.00/hour) $420.00

Total $474.00

Next time I’ll hire Michael at $200 for a custom door, and have him ship it down.

–rakkity