“Simple enough” a goal not yet attained

The plan was simple enough….. Yes, with that you already know what’s coming.
(This post is mostly the events of the day… I’ll ponder my thoughts through it later)

Today, Tuesday, I took the day off work to devote time to those must-complete projects before I’m living in the house. That officially begins in five days. Today I would work along with Troy at the house. I would tear out more of the suspect tile in the bathroom, help with setting the exterior door in the bedroom, help with setting the new front door, and I’d bought all the hardware for Troy to hang the pendant light fixture in the dining room. Once all this was done I could set up my bedroom, shuffle more things around and run a few loads of stuff over to the house.

I began the day with a couple of errands and then started ripping out tile in the bathroom. It wasn’t long before Troy arrived and examined the rotten studs being revealed by my work. His verdict was that all the tile on the exterior wall needed to be removed as well as the exterior siding… the studs were thoroughly rotten and crumbling. It was fortuitous that Troy’s sub. was available so he was called in to begin ripping out the siding.

Next we moved to the back bedroom door. Upon unwrapping the door it took Home Depot so dang long to send, Troy uttered those words I did not want to hear: “It’s broken.”  Sure enough, the casing was split down one side and separated from all three sets of hinges. I called Home Depot and after navigating five levels of voice menus, I reached someone. She could have the door picked up and a new one delivered, but when I asked if it could be expedited, she noted that they no longer sell the door I just bought. WHAT??!!?!  She should have known better, but she repeated herself. I asked her what she then had available virtually identical at same price to offer in replacement. Surprisingly, this was the right thing to ask.They indeed did have the identical door, hung for right swing rather than left. OK, I’ll take it!  The unfortunate part? You guessed it… it will sit in processing for at least 10 days and I’ll have it in 15-20 days. I can only suppose, this is a deliberate disincentive–they don’t want people buying stuff online.  The makeshift solution? We removed the old front door and put it on the back and I stuffed the gaps letting in the cold air with carpet padding torn up from the part of the house that will be torn down.

The new front door thankfully was not broken; however, upon removing the old door, Troy noticed very odd building practices underneath… the edges of the studs did not extend to the base of the door and some extra boards were nailed in there. The great thing about having a person who really knows this stuff is that Troy simply shook his head, said “this isn’t right,” walked to his truck for some tools and in 15 minutes, had the problem corrected. From there, Troy and his sub. worked at setting the door and found it wouldn’t fit for all the gobs of spray foam the last workman had sprayed in there, so those had to be carved away. Then it fit lop-sided. Guess what caused that? In part of the front room, there are apparently TWO layers of drywall on the walls. I’m not even going to ask why. After quite a long time of fussing and trimming, Troy got the door in place and it looks great. PHEW! While the handle set for the front door was to have arrived today, it didn’t. The lock set for the back door we can’t place because it’s broken is temporarily on the front door.

In the meanwhile I tried calling Frontier to have my internet service for the rental house disconnected. They looked for my account for more than 10 minutes, couldn’t find I was a customer, and apologized that maybe it was because of software upgrades but they wouldn’t be able to schedule a disconnection.

Toward the end of the day, the siding was off and Troy had bought studs to work with and at night, I had a chance to set up the bedroom for occupancy though no time for additional loads or dealing with boxes there at the house.

So, we have a makeshift door on the bedroom exterior, a gaping hole where the bathroom wall used to be, a new front door with hardware temporarily borrowed from the back door, and the pendant lamp still waiting to be hung.

It should have been simple enough. Oh well.