My first project for the day was putting in a magnetic door stop.
The bathroom floor slopes a lot. That would be worrisome, except that the reason was apparent. There was a cast iron claw-foot bathtub next to the outside wall. The tub itself easily weighs over three hundred pounds, plus you’d drop in 80 gallons or so of water (six hundred forty pounds), and a two-hundred pound human. I have removed the tub (it will go in an outdoor pavilion one day). On the outside of that same wall was a small but heavy solar plant that I recently gave away. With batteries, it weighed at least five hundred pounds. So that one wall was supporting over ¾ ton of weight, most of it continuously. I suspect the 111-year-old walls of the original house might have been up to it, but the bathroom is part of the “new” addition built in the early 1930’s and it sunk a couple of inches under the load.
When we moved in, the bathroom door would jam against the high side of the floor when I tried to open it all the way, and partially block the opening. Yet when I walked into the bathroom, my weight would depress the floor enough that the door would come free and close in my face. When closed, the door wouldn’t latch, but would fall partway open. Someone had put a slide-latch bolt on it for privacy, but that was now so far out of alignment that you couldn’t actually secure it.
I took the door down and shaved enough off the bottom so that it no longer rubbed on the floor. After that, it wouldn’t stay open, which we fixed with this novelty 3-D printed door stop I had floating around:
I also replaced the door knob and latch.
Now it would stay open or closed, but our choice was to leave it closed all the time — which some people seem to like, but I couldn’t tell if it was in use. Or we could open it and jam in the door stop, but it was kind of a project to mess with removing and re-installing the door stop just to take a quick pee, and there was still the problem that walking into the bathroom depressed the floor enough to cause the door to try to swing shut and it would hit me in the back when I was standing at the sink.
In addition to all that, on windy days gusts would cause the door to slam shut, which would scare Luna the Big Dog™ and make me cross.
The solution was to replace Hodor with a magnetic contrivance that would latch the door when it was fully opened, but easily release it when someone wanted to close it:
These are little things, and my time would probably have been better spent finishing the plumbing and drywall in the studio, or designing a deck for my hot tub, or working on the design for our new front lanai (needs to be done before the front porch collapses), or finishing re-wiring the house, or putting up a handrail for the garage stairs, or fixing the broken counterweights in our 111 year-old windows, or assembling my e-bike, or bringing power and water to the garage, or fixing the broken washing machine, or installing the electric opener on our gate, or painting (house, garage, outdoor shower, studio), or re-rocking the driveway, or…
That’s the nice thing about being new to a place. I find that I’m much more likely to notice the little things and do something about them, and some very little things (like a magnetic doorstop) can make a big improvement in quality of life. After I’ve lived in a place for a while, I stop noticing the little inconveniences and just live with them.
I will have to work on a way to not stop seeing and correcting deficiencies, since I plan to live here a very long time.
—2p