A Renaissance Man Does Home Repair
I got ambitious yesterday in terms of home maintenance.
The door from the TV room to the carport has had a gradually failing lock set. I’d already replaced the deadbolt on that door a few years ago, and the doorknob worked at that time. As of this weekend, the doorknob mechanism had deteriorated to the point where it just didn’t work. (Okay, it might have been longer than that. Fine — it’s been a lot longer than that.) The plate on the door frame had been re-positioned several times and the door just wasn’t staying shut anymore, so I prepared to head out to the Big Warehouse Retailer Specializing in Handyman and Contractor Things to get and install a new door lock set.
I take the plate off of the door frame and look at the wood underneath. It isn’t too bad, but I decide to get putty for the door frame just in case I have to rework any of the screw holes or the hole for the bolt. I haven’t any idea of how to use that stuff, but I saw a video on YouTube once and wood filler putty seemed to be part of the process. While I’m there, I figure I’ll get one of those spatula/scraper things that I’ll need two years from now and not be able to find by then. Hey, it was in the video, right?
I close the door, go to my desk to get my watch and wallet, and when I get back to the door I find I can’t get out. The latch on the doorknob just won’t move anymore. That isn’t really an issue, because I can just remove the doorknob and…wait — this thing has no external screws. So I go out the front door of the house (rarely used because it can’t be unlocked from the outside), walk into the carport and find there aren’t any screw holes on the outside knob, either — to be expected because that would be a stupid design, particularly if you want to keep people from coming into your house to steal your “cookies’n’cream”-flavored sandwich cookies, armed only with a Philips-head screwdriver.
(Now, having made a comment on rational design for lock set installations, I have to make a confession: professionally my work consists of manipulating electrons and magnetic charge domains in order to make computers perform particular tasks. I don’t do protons and neutrons — too bulky. As an on-line gaming acquaintance said when I mentioned my project plan: “There are people for that.” Intellectually I understand that to be factual. Intuitively I can’t make the leap. My spouse says the same thing: “can’t we just hire someone to fix that?” The best I answer I can come up with is “yes, if we were renting. But we own this, so it’s my responsibility.” I usually follow this with “besides, it’s just four screws, a bracket, and a tri-axially oscillating reciprocal flange grommet, so what could go wrong?” Besides, I’m a programmer. I manipulate elemental forces of physics at a fundamental level, and I can do anything because I fixed a thing once.)
I get my tool bags and go back to the side of the door on which there’s air conditioning and consider the issue of getting the door open. (I have multiple tool bags because if I put all my tools in one bag I can’t lift it.) Two things are on my mind at this point:
- In order to put another lock set on this door, I have to remove the current one first, and
- My spouse will be home in less than an hour and I’m going to be in trouble if the door won’t open when she gets here.
(As a married man I exist in one of three states: just got out of trouble, in trouble, or just about to get into trouble. Actually, I think I can exist in all three states simultaneously. Who says quantum mechanical states don’t manifest in the macro world?)
Luckily, the Giant Warehouse Store of Enticing and Expensive Tools You’ll Misplace Later is only six minutes’ drive from Casa Necesita Reparación, so with my plan firmly in mind (“I’m going to go to the store”), I go to the store. I manage to locate Hardware Guy Who Only Works on Weekends and explain the doorknob issue, and he says there’s a ring between the trim plate and the door that needs to be removed before I can access the screws. I saw that ring but couldn’t figure out how to remove it, since the pry gap was facing the door frame with a 1.5 inch clearance (for those of you that only do metric, I think that’s about 33.3 decibels). I conclude that the best way to remove that ring would be for the door to be open — but that’s already not going to happen. Hardware Guy says that there’s a small notch which I can use to remove the doorknob that might make it easier to resolve — but that the key has to be in the lock and turned to a particular position on order to remove the knob.
He’s just told me I have to be on both sides of the closed door at the same time. We’ve already established that I can do one sort of quantum-mechanical superposition — but this is one I can’t do. I start mapping out future time-lines in my head and decide that I still (somehow) need to take any branch that doesn’t involve my hearing “why didn’t you just hire somebody?”
When I get back home I try my key in the lock and find that the mechanism is sufficiently broken for me to get the key to stay in the “far unlock” position — although I’m just guessing because Hardware Guy didn’t tell me what position the key should be in and I forgot to ask. I go back into the house via the front door, find the magic knob-removal notch and manage to get the doorknob off. Now, I think, I’ll be able to get in there to remove the lock ring and…no. I can’t. All I’ve done is give myself a better view of not being able to remove it.
Time is ticking away and the class on organic, fair-trade, carbon-neutral, non-GMO expressionist painting that my spouse is taking will soon be over. I start working out my defense against the accusation that a professional locksmith wouldn’t be in this situation, and “yes, but I’m not a professional locksmith” doesn’t sound very convincing when I play back the discussion in my head. I consider the idea that maybe there’s another YouTube video I could watch, but give up because I can’t figure out what I’d type into the search box. “Lock set installation for idiots?”
Then inspiration comes in the form of this revelation: I have a hammer. In the best tradition of 50,000 years of human civilization — mostly characterized by guys trying to hide their home/cave-repair mistakes before their wives get home — when all else fails, the Overwhelming Application of Force (preferably by Blunt Force Trauma) will save the day.
Hammer in hand, I have that trim plate off in no time. With the screws exposed I can get the hardware off on the inside, and the parts on the other side end up on the concrete landing outside the door. This is progress!
The door still won’t open.
Using the many tools available in the bag, I pull, bend, smack, and otherwise abuse the now-exposed lock cylinder in an attempt to get it out, but only manage to produce a shower of broken springs and shattered metal bits, which, for all I know, is what locks are made of. I go outside to try from that angle, find the knob and mountings on the landing, and put them into the trash. I can push the bolt back with a mini-screwdriver enough to get the door open (since there aren’t springs holding the bolt in a closed position now), so I do so, and remove the lock cylinder.
Just then the phone rings. It’s herself, on her way home and wishing to be taken to lunch. I mumble that I’m working on the lock set, which comes as a complete surprise to her, even though I’d almost sort of kind of referred to the idea two days before, probably. She says “then we don’t be able to go to lunch” in that tone that strongly suggests I’m about to be in trouble, and I say, “sure we will” just before she hangs up.
Putting in a modern lock set is a lot easier than taking an older one out, especially if you don’t have to do the woodworking parts. I have it all put together before she gets home. I thought I’d make sure that the deadbolt was still aligned properly, and since I’m outside at the time, I reach for my key…and realize I don’t have it. The old lock and the deadbolt shared the same key and when I tossed the old hardware into the 90-gallon trash can my key went with it. (For the metrically inclined, I’m pretty sure 90 gallons is about 286 cubic amperes.)
Note to self: deodorize the trash can.
I didn’t need to use any of the wood filler putty because it turns out the alignment of the plate and the door latch works just fine. I was happy that it had worked out and that I hadn’t been forced to explain all the things that went wrong before my spouse got home. The programmer had manipulated protons and neutrons and gotten away with it.
Later in the afternoon, in which my spouse was attending another art class — I think it was “Meditative Pen and Ink Soap Carving” — and my son was out having some sort of Saturday adventure, I was sitting at my computer and heard a noise from the kitchen. I thought “oh, my son is back early.” I heard another noise and looked toward the kitchen. “Oh, my son is back early and he’s turned off the kitchen light.”
He wasn’t back. The ballast in the kitchen light fixture had just given up the ghost, and there were noises involved. (Awesome. Sort of. Okay — not really.)
That is a story for another day, but I cannot conclude here without mentioning that the installation instructions for the ballast said “this unit should only be installed by a licensed professional electrician.”
Yeah.
No.
Props and thanks to Pat Sponaugle for “Overwhelming Application of Force.”
