February 28, 2013
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The Door
The installer came with the back door today. It’s the wrong size.
A brief history of The Door: last fall it occurred to me (because I sit in the direct line of the Conservatory door) that the dog door, which we must have installed last spring (?) allows air the same temperature as the outdoors to flow into the Conservatory and right up my back. It may have been a coolish day in the fall. Fall. That season of increasingly coolish temperatures with no hope for reprieve. I mentioned this to Nancy. That and the fact that the dogs rush outside, where they have converted our nicely sodded back yard into a mud pit, and then dash back inside, creating this brown track from the door to wherever the most of the dirt finally wears off.
The BACK door, however, does not blow air up my back, and it opens onto an artificial hardwood floor which seems, in my imagination at least, easier to clean.
We thought, “Why not install a dog door in the back door?”
I imagined an $80-150 dog door, but it turns out the existing back door has non-cooperative panels. It leaks (always has.) We needed a whole new door.
Nancy called and ordered the door. For a mere $35 additional dollars a trained professional could come to our house to measure the door. “Oh, pooh,” you might have said, “I could measure my own door!” This would indicate you have not repaired anything in this house, which was built to withstand tornadoes and nuclear attack and NOTHING IN IT is a conventional size. This includes the back door. It’s an odd size. It’s also built right into the house. (Really. Still, this seems to come as an odd surprise to installers.) It’s built right into a brick house. We paid the $35 dollars, which so far has saved us something close to $1000.00 and it’s still climbing.
Nancy ordered the door in early October, before she has her hip replaced. Something happened, some sort of delay, and we let it go for a while. Last month they delivered the door. I was…somewhere else. The door had been mismeasured. They sent it back.
We waited a month. (The times here could be off: it has become such a saga I no longer remember fine details.) They rebuilt the door and then scheduled a new install.
The day of the install arrived in a driving blizzard and the installer called in snowbound and rescheduled. For a month later.
Then someone called and scheduled it for the next day instead.
This morning the installer arrived, door in tow. He went to the back door and measured.
The door is the wrong size.
He could install the door, but it would require modifying the door opening, which is a.) time-consuming, b.) sacrilegious, or c.) a pain in the ass. He called the company that sold us the door.
By now Nancy and I are sitting at our twin computer cracking jokes about how many installers it takes to deliver the right door, how many doors it takes to fit the hole, and we are burning sage and doing ritual thanksgiving dances over the best-spent $35 of our lives.
So while the installer was talking to the company on one line and Nancy was talking to the company on our land phone, my cell phone rang: it was the company. The door did not fit because it was the same door they brought the last time. The new revised door was still sitting in the warehouse.
So the installer–his name is ‘Mike’–has gone to fetch the other door. We think he’s coming back.
We’re pretty sure he’s not going to install our door in the house of his next customer on the list because–I may have mentioned this–everything in our house is odd-sized.
