DIY frustration

So, this is a project I wasn’t planning to share with you all, but when it became a pain in my butt I decided I would. Sometimes even I read blogs and think everyone’s got it together, but posts like this are nice. Because nobody has it all together, especially not me. :)

Have you seen that Lowe’s commercial, the one with the ceiling fan and the guy throws it out the window? That’s my husband’s favorite commercial because he says it reminds him of me. I get frustrated easily when a project doesn’t go my way. Like, nearly throwing a fan out the window, frustrated.

It doesn’t happen often. But when it does…watch out windows.

The door in this post was almost thrown from the house, if I could have gotten it removed to even throw it. It will make sense in a few.

So remember when I showed you our spray painted door knobs and how they weren’t holding up well?:

Many of you felt my pain with the chipping paint on knobs – but some of you had great luck with spray painting them. I think sanding may be the key? Also, a less used knob helps I’m sure. I sprayed our back and garage door knobs and they both wore off pretty fast but this one on the garage door was worse.

But the knob was working so I had no plans to change it out – I figured they last forever so there wouldn’t be any need to buy a new one for a while.

Well, knobs don’t last forever, and now I know! :) One day recently it just stopped working. For a few hours we could jiggle it and the latch bolt (the thing that sticks out and keeps the door shut) would move and we could open it. By that evening it wouldn’t jiggle anymore – totally, completely stuck.

I’ve never seen anything like it – this door gets more use than any other one in our house for sure, but it literally worked fine and then went to crap within a few hours. Annoying.

So, I needed to replace the door knob. But I kept running out of time to run to Lowe’s and one day turned into the next and eventually we were one week in to using the front door and the garage keypad to get into the garage or get to the cars. Not ideal. Finally I picked up the new knob and sat down to replace it, figuring it would take a few minutes.

The “take a few minutes” curse. I’ve spoken of this and the “this will be easy” curse before. You never, EVER say it. Out loud or in your head.

Well, I mentioned the door wouldn’t open, and when I took the old knob off nothing else would budge. The parts of the latch were stuck in there:

And there wasn’t anything I could do to get them out.

I took that photo after I spent 30 minutes destroying the longer part of the latch with a screwdriver and a hammer:

It was at that point that I started taking photos because I knew this was going to be a royal pain.

I had to just pound it out of there, because there was no other way to remove it. The other parts were still in the door though.

I tried EVERYTHING. The door would not budge, the latch would not budge. About an hour in I decided we would just never use the garage door EVER EVER AGAIN and it would be FINE.

But now I was mad. If I had to beat the door down I was going to do this. (You see the window reference now?) I tried taking the door off the hinges, and finally got the pins out but the door still wouldn’t move. I was home alone at this point and needed two of us to move it back and forth to get it out. I was determined to get this done before my husband got home though because I was going to conquer this door on my own.

It took 90 minutes total – NINETY MINUTES. With the pins out of the door hinges I could at least move it around a bit, so I was finally able to get the flathead screwdriver in there to move things around a little.

After a lot of banging and a little jiggling I finally got the door almost open – I put the pins back in the hinges, went around through the garage and then pushed the door open and hallelujah! The door finally opened!!

This is what was left:

The latch had actually come OFF. What the??

And by the time I was done the door was beat up:

You can see the rest of the latch in there. It still wouldn’t come out – I had to take the whole thing off the door.

What should have been two pieces turned into about eight by the time I was done:

Now the door needs to be sanded down and touched up, but it works!

The silver lining is that we now have a nice, pretty, not-rubbing-off oil rubbed bronze knob:

GoodNESS. It took forever, but I did it! And the door is still in the house, not in the yard, which is huge for me. :)

Any of you get frustrated when DIY doesn’t go your way? Usually I know how to fix stuff, so when something challenges me I can get easily annoyed. But I won this one. After an hour and a half.

 

P.S. If you’d like to see how to change out your door knobs, check out this post.