Murphy's Law

Again, I spent the weekend doing a couple of simple home fix ups. Oh wait, did I say simple?

Saturday Kris asked me to fix the back door. The threshold was old and was a little drafty. I had bought a new threshold to install with a seal, and just like the front door that I did a couple of weeks ago, I should have figured it would be anything but simple.

A couple of weeks ago I tried fixing a little draft under the front door. Well it turned into a two day affair. I was originally going to put a sweep on the bottom of the door, that turned into replacing the entire threshold and putting a door sweep in the inside of the door. It was one thing after another, but I finally got it done, though I still need to replace some of the weather stripping around the door frame.

Well I tried to take what I learned with the front door and apply that to fixing the back door. The one thing I thought I would be able to get away with was just cutting it to the size of the doorway. The front door needed to have notches cut out to fit the bottom of the frame. so the back door went in pretty easily. but then I ended up having to cut out small notches. I also found out that the threshold is slightly angled because the laminate floor that we put in a few years back is a bit higher than the adjoining threshold.

Well to make a long story short, it got screwed down, but then when the door was closed, it dragged across the rubber seal, pulling it out of the threshold. At first I wanted to try planing he bottom of the door, but after screwing around with it and moving it to the basement to work on it (and banging it into the walls and scraping/chipping the paint on teh walls) I decided to simply install the door sweep on the inside to stop any drafts and I would try fixing the seal in the threshold later. At least this only took me about three and a half hours of playing around as opposed to the two days it took to try and fix the front door.

So, why is it the simple fixes are never simple? It makes me think twice about any other home improvement projects. If something as simple as fixing a draft around a door, how am I ever going to be able to do anything else, such as renovating the bathroom or the kitchen?