The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.
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9:26pm on Tuesday, 19th April, 2011:
Anecdote
I thought Ihad it bad yesterday removing the doorstep between the kitchen and the utility room. That only took 6 hours, though. Today, I was co-opted to work on installing the door itself. That took 11½ hours and it still doesn't have a handle.
The first 2½ hours were spent removing the old door frame. When I said the house was constructed around the door, I meant it: the nails holding the door frame in place were embedded in the cement of the brickwork, so we couldn't pull them out — we had to use a hacksaw to cut them. Chunks of plaster came off when the wood came out, apparently preferring to bond to the paint connecting it to the door frame than to the wall. We then spent an hour going and buying the wood for the new frame (because my wife wanted the door to open the other way, so we couldn't use the old frame). Strangely, the 3¼ inch door frame is no longer quite as in fashion as it was when the house was built, so we had to go with a 70mm width instead. That had to be cut and screwed into the brickwork, which we did in the afternoon.
Ah, brick dust. I've no idea how it managed to coat everything within a 3 metre radius of where I was drilling, but it did. It got everywhere. I breathed it, it bunged up my eyes, it went down my sleeves. If you ever want to style your hair and then fix it in place, there's no need to buy hairspray — brick dust works just as well, if not better.
Next up was fitting the door to the frame. I thought it looked a bit high up, but my father-in-law in his capacity of foreman told me it was fine. It wasn't fine. We got the hinges attached and then had to spend 45 minutes planing the top of the door off with a surform so it could shut. Meanwhile, the gap at the bottom is big enough that a cat could squeeze under it.
It does look good, though, apart from that minor not having a handle thing.
Also in the Bartle household, my elder daughter blew most of my monthly Internet download quota by installing Portal 2 on her sister's PC. It took 10 hours for the download to complete.
So, 11½ hours to install one portal and 10 hours to install another.
Maybe tomorrow I'll get some work done.
Referenced by 13 Years Older.
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Copyright © 2011 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).