Doors. Doors as far as the eye can see.
Hello everyone. Once again it has been a week of nothing but work, but at least this time there are photos.
First, the long slog that is the door painting project continued. The closet doors in Anne’s office are nearly done. However, there was a problem with the new hinges I bought:
The top row is a new hinge and an old one. Same with the bottom row, but reversed. Note the size difference. The old hinges were mounted on the edges of the doors; between them, if you will. The hole patterns are a perfect match, but because the new hinges are wider than the old ones (or deeper, if you prefer) there is a challenge. These doors are apparently an odd (or old) thickness, and these hinges are too thick for the doors. If I reuse the old screw holes then a bit of the hinges would stick out into the room, which is definitely not good. And if I move them so nothing sticks out, some of the screws are so close to the edges of the wood that they will tear right out. Those hinges will not work.
I did a lot of digging around online looking for alternatives and found no exact matches. But going over all the closet doors in the house, I think this is the only set that is that thin. All the other doors are thicker and will work with the new hinges. I have no explanation. Maybe some of the closet doors from the oldest part of the house (now about 61 years old) were replaced, but the set in Anne’s office was not. Honestly, I have no idea.
Regardless, I needed to figure something else out, so I found some standard narrow hinges that I could mount on the inside of the doors (rather than between them), as seen in the first photo below.
The second photo shows the repairs I have started to make to the edges of the doors where the old hinges mounted, and the last one shows the doors installed in Anne’s office. The carpet in there is still a nightmare from the great heating system flood of 2020, and will get replaced eventually.
I have yet to paint the repairs on the edges of the doors. I will do that in the coming week. Anne will be out of town so I can open the doors and touch things up on the edges easily while she is gone.
The good news is that getting those doors out of my studio means I can get started on some art again.
Ha ha ha! Just kidding! Anyone expecting hand made holiday cards from me this year is going to be disappointed. Sorry.
No, instead of art I get to paint the next set of closet doors. These come from the guest bedroom and while the outsides are a badly beat up white, the insides are probably the ugliest colour imaginable:
How about that ugly yellow, or mustard, or whatever it is? Wow. Who would paint anything that colour?
Anyway, these are now in process and (of course) I discovered another oddity. This is a set of four bifold doors in two pairs. Perfectly normal for a standard closet. But the carpenters that framed the closet were nitwits and it’s a bit narrower than it should be for standard bi-fold doors. So they narrowed one door a little bit. The normal stiles on these doors are 1.25" wide, but in the photo above you can see the cut edge on the rightmost side. It’s only about 1" wide, and it was cut freehand (badly!) with a circular saw.
If the left side pair of doors is one quarter inch narrower than normal because one of them is cut down, you’d expect the same thing of the rightmost door of the other pair, wouldn’t you? I mean, it needs to look good — or at least balanced — and the doors are pretty tight in the opening anyway. And both sides are similarly cut down in the doors I just reinstalled in Anne’s office. But no, they didn’t do that in this bedroom. Only one edge of one door is cut down.
Being me, I had to narrow the edge on the rightmost door to match. That exposed a bunch of dowel joints where the dowels were not quite fully inserted when the door was manufactured, so those are being patched. They will never be seen, given they are on the edge of the door that goes up against the framed closet opening. When the door is open that edge turns to face inside the closet, so they’re invisible even then. But I fix things like this when I find them. That’s just the way I do things.
Two of the other three doors are already primed though, and will start getting their top coat today. And when I am done with this closet no one will even know that yellow colour exists.
Another project wound up this week. The wall behind the vanity in the tiny guest bathroom is now patched back up. Here is a very exciting photo sequence:
The first photos shows the entirely patched back of the drawer stack. I have not put the drawers back in because I intend to paint this room soon, and they need to be out to paint the wall just to their right.
The next three photos show the patchwork on the sink side:
- The main piece of wood screwed down
- The covers that close up the rest of the openings
- The vertical support (just behind the cabinet doors) reinstalled
Technically I could probably put the doors back on, but leaving them off until the painting is done also makes sense, so I am doing that.
Painting in there is one of the two big(ish) projects I hope to tackle while Anne is away. The other is the ceiling in her office. No clue if I will get both of those done, but I will try. Anne’s office comes first, since I can’t paint it while she is working for a living.
That’s it for the house projects this week, but there was one other thing going on: I spent another day working on the frame for the public art project. I managed to get the winch and cable installed (mostly… still a couple of tweaks needed) and the rotation mechanism now works as you can see in the video below:
In addition to the tweaks on the cable installation it still needs the legs to support it when it is laying flat. That’s coming.
For those wondering, the white, square frame you see in the video above is kind of magical. It is a near perfect replica of two other frames: one on the side of the local SkyTrain station and the other on the front of a building at the school.
Students taking the public art class build an art piece that mounts on that frame, then it is installed on the SkyTrain station and (eventually) the building on campus. I helped build such a project when I took the class:
You can see the steel frame in the lower left and upper right corners. That frame is just like the white one in the video above. Students build their work on that frame in the shop, and then the work is removed from the shop frame and installed in one of the the two display locations.
The thing I built is a piece of infrastructure to help make the creation of these projects safer in the future. The frame rotates flat so students can work with heavy pieces of steel easily. Then it rotates up to put everything in the right viewing position. No one has to climb a ladder holding heavy stuff anymore. It’s a big win.
Getting the frame to the point where the rotation mechanism works is a huge deal. The shop coordinator and I are both really happy to see it working. As I say, a few nits remain to finish up, and eventually the school will get some students to paint it all to protect it from rust. Otherwise life is good.
That’s it for this week. I trust you are keeping safe and sane.