Troll Echos

Unless you’ve ever had to actually install a storm door, you probably think of them as the fun extra door that gets in the way when you are getting a new couch or refrigerator delivered and that they are just standard issue house “stuff.” I now find myself as a member of the group that has had to install a storm door. Few things you could ever install onto/into your house seem like they could be easier. In reality, few things could be farther from the truth than that assumption.

My original concept of what the process would involve closely imitated the storm door displays in Home Depot. Wonderfully ready to go screen door in a box that need only be lined up in the hole and screwed in place. This concept was promptly dashed as I opened the box of my very own storm door to install and discovered exactly how many pieces it came in and that it had its own 12-step program.

Storm doors, you see, are designed to fit an impressive number of possible doorways. Ones that aren’t quite straight, ones that are wider in some places than others, ones that aren’t any standard width, ones where the hinge-side and latch-side are interchangeable, and so on. To allow for such flexibility in design, the number of tools needed to install one climbs dramatically, and the number of parts of the door that are ready to go out of the box are reduced to almost zero. Once you are ready to start be sure you know where your closest hardware store is, you’ll need it. Repeatedly.

In my case, I discovered a very real need for a hacksaw, a trip to the store to buy screws that failed to be included in the package, tons of measuring with a tape measure, some more measuring with a ruler, a collection of screw driver bits, drill bits, and even a center punch. Diagrams in the instruction book were designed to be understood by the common idiot, with a PhD in Physics and twin masters in Geometry and Spacial Reasoning. Things that sound simple like “To identify which side is the top, you just do this” actually take a keen sense of logical analysis and a dictionary to figure out the reference point names they use.

When all was said and (sorta) done, my screen door is only partially attached and is carefully attached to the railing of my porch with string to prevent being battered by wind. It’s not what I would call “installed.” The project will have to continue after acquiring more screws that match the aesthetics of the doorway and door.

The next day I finished installing the door and all it’s various bits, but I’m almost 100% convinced that I did something wrong. Despite having read each step of the directions no fewer than 5 times and trying my absolute best to fully understand what I was about to do, before I did anything I would regret, I fully believe I’ve installed the storm door incorrectly. I question whether or not it can be corrected without massive amounts of work and also whether my front door is designed to take the storm door I got.

fur·ni·ture tet·ris: [fur-ni-cher tet-ris] -noun

1. the game involving taking an entire room worth of furniture and stacking it in another smaller room so it takes up the least possible amount of space.
2. the appearance furniture takes on after being stacked in such a way as to leave virtually no room between individual pieces and can therefore be “cleared.”

This evening was spent playing furniture tetris. The goal was to take all of the furniture out of the living room and fit it into the kitchen. Bear in mind while picturing this that the kitchen is approximately the same size as the living room, but it’s got a table, some chairs, cabinetry, a few major appliances, cat food bowls, and a garbage can all taking up space. Also worth picturing is that the living room started with the following items: a big heavy TV and the stand for it, a few video game consoles and loads of wire share space with the TV stand, a sleeper couch, a love seat, a chair, a piano and stool, 2 end tables complete with lamps, a coffee table, a small book case full of video games, a few boxes full of DVD cases and/or more video games, and a wine rack with literally 99 bottles of wine in it.

Now with my back aching something fierce and my kitchen being entirely full of stuff, my living room is ready to get the carpet ripped out and the laminate flooring put in. It’s going to be another busy weekend of working around the house.

In an on-going effort to make my house nice to sell (or if the market refuses to be helpful, to rent out) I made several trips to the store today to buy a hefty pile of laminate flooring. What I’ve learned about redoing the flooring of a room is that you must always buy more than you think you need. There will always be scraps that you can’t use because they have the wrong dove tail edge or they are damaged or a previous cut was made to tailor a specific corner which made the rest of the piece useless or any of a million other things.

Now there are places that will happily sell you flooring over the internet but I can’t in good conscience use any of them. You haven’t properly appreciated shipping charges until you’ve tried to figure out how much it would cost to get 1200 lbs of wood to stack in your garage. If the place promises free shipping, you can rest assured that it is built into the price of whatever you are buying. Also, without having actually seen the material you are about to sink large amounts of money into with your own eyes, it’s hard to know what you’ll end up with. That last point is especially important because the term “laminate flooring” can refer to several different types of flooring.

Some types are much like standard issue vinyl flooring. Think linoleum and realize that if your goal is the hard wood look for less money, this isn’t likely the approach you want. People will know there isn’t any wood involved. If you get the kind that involves what some places call “pre-finished hard wood” (where the stuff is at least mostly made out of real wood) you need to be absolutely sure you get lots more than you need because there are a zillion variables that will make getting more of the same stuff a pain in the butt. They come in about a dozen thicknesses, they can have an almost unlimited number of dove tail / locking tab / leaf edge systems (which seem to be brand specific), and they come in hundreds of woods (or wood appearances at least.) Beyond all that some require a dense rubber mat to be installed below them for sound dampening and general flexibility and others have a padding mat like substance pre-mounted on the bottom. Still others require the pieces to be glued together, and some actually don’t and are usually referred to as “floating” floors due to the fact that they are sitting on a rubber mat and held in place almost entirely just by being properly fitted to the room they are sitting it together.

I have acquired around 815 square feet of flooring for a task I’ve calculated to need around 640 square feet of supplies. I picked it up at a store in person so I got to see it and choose it myself. And I had to make 3 trips to the store to get it all home in my car. I could comfortably lug around a dozen boxes of the flooring material which came in ~35lb boxes containing 22.7 square feet in 9 pieces. Try not to do the math on how much lifting I had to do tonight to get it from the shelf at the store to a neat pile in my garage.

With help of relatives that are coming in this weekend, I hope to get a lot of the stuff installed. There will undoubtedly be several more trips to places like Home Depot to get the edge pieces, possibly glue if the vote is held to glue my “glueless” flooring, and any other supplies that I haven’t thought of yet. It should be interesting.