After all that work to resize the replacement door for the sun room, painting it, carving out the recesses (and fixing my goof), touching up the paint, the door finally got hung up today!

Aaaaannnnd…

It doesn’t fit.

Part of the problem is the hinges. The original hinges on the door were put back on, not the hinges from the old door. The screws are stripped on some of those and we weren’t even able to get all of them off to salvage them. The hinges that were on the replacement door position the door slightly differently. Once the door was hung up, the girls found it was too “tall”. By mere millimeters!

The easiest thing to do turned out to be removing the top molding of the frame.

So they did that.

It still didn’t fit.

This is the door, at the middle of the frame.

We’re looking at about 1/8th to 1/4 of an inch here.

This is the door at the top of the frame.

Yeah.

There’s a gap.

So, weather willing, tomorrow we will get that table saw out of the shed and see if it works. If it does, we’ll take the molding off the top and side, cut it and reinstall it.

Straight.

Then carve out a new recess for the plate that gets installed in the frame, because that’ll be cut right off.

Once we’ve got that done, we’ll just repaint the frame.

What a pain in the butt this is turning out to be!

If the table saw turns out to not work… I’m not sure what we’ll do. I’d hate to have to take the door off and trim the door knob side! We can’t trim any more on the hinge side at this point. We’d have to take the door knob assembly off, and I suppose we could use the circular saw again. It would be very difficult to take off such a tiny amount with that, though.

*sigh*

Ah, well. It’s not like we have a lot of choices. We’re just making do with what we have for now.

Speaking of making do…

When my brother and I visited our mother earlier today, I made sure to ask him about the sump pump hose attachment, showing him the pictures I’d taken.

I learned all sorts of details from him! Like why he had to McGyver the pipes in the basement, adding an extension. Someone else had tried to replace the pump and pipes for my dad and… well, let’s just say, after my dad called my brother to come fix it, he found the pump dangling at about a 30 degree angle, because the person who did it couldn’t be bothered to add a section of pipe to extend it, so it could stand straight in the reservoir. So my brother did that, and the pump is now nice and straight. It may not be the prettiest job, but it’s solid, and I should not need to replace any of it.

I also learned that he had installed a flexible hose on the outside. No, not the one that’s there now. He used a proper sump pump hose kit, like what I bought two of. He said it was about 50 ft long, and drained over by the storage house.

Then one day, he came over and the hose that’s there now had been attached. The long one was gone.

From what he’d been able to gather, someone had run over the hose with a lawn mower.

So my dad used what hose he could find and, rather than getting a fitting to attach the larger hose to the smaller pipe, he wrapped something around the smaller pipe, then clamped the bigger hose on. I had thought the stuff looked like batting, and he thinks it was probably stuffing from an old couch or something like that.

I confirmed that the pipe going through the wall is 1 1/4″ pipe, and that it should be just the end of the pipe on the outside of the wall; nothing weird done to it – though it might have been cut shorter on the outside. I’ll know that when I take off the broken hose.

The fittings that come with the hose kit won’t work, though, since they have a threaded end to attach directly to the sump pump. I should have what I need to attach the hose to the pipe, though, in among the extra parts and pieces I got, just in case.

Now that I’ve double checked details with my brother, this is something I hope to get done, tomorrow!

The Re-Farmer