House Holes

Today I’m going to talk about holes in houses.  House holes, as it were.  You know the type…doors, windows, that sort of thing.  In the last couple of days, house holes have been rather important around here.

Bear with me as I give you a bit of personal door history that seems irrelevant, but isn’t.  I break door latches.  I am a world-class latch breaker.  You see, we live in a farmhouse that is well over 100 years old.  Old houses like to move with the seasons.  When they do, the outside doors often don’t shut properly because everything ceases to line up and the latches don’t latch.  To me, this is unacceptable, so I try to force them closed until I break the latch.  I should be more precise and say latchES because I’ve done this more than once.  I swear it will work someday, but don’t tell my long-suffering husband Bill that I said that.  I’m in enough trouble already.

Since I’ve broken multiple latchES, I’ve had to make do.  I swapped a latch from one much-used door to another that is used rarely.  They are identical so I thought: “hey we never use this door so let me swap the latches out and we’ll be good to go!  So I did that and we WERE good to go.  The two doors we used the most were in perfect working order.  For a while…

It was when the frost settled under the sunroom that things got a little dicey.  You know where I’m going with this right?  Yes, the main door at the back of the house was no longer shutable.  Is that a word?  Hey, if I typed it, it must be. Being the stubborn person I am, I HAD to make that door close. Yes, I broke that latch, too.  This was a problem because this door would now swing in the wind unless we locked it.  But if we locked it, we could no longer enter the back of the house.  I finally figured out a bungee cord solution that kept the wind from opening it up, but we still locked it most of the time because our Great Dane Walter would get out otherwise.  It wasn’t a perfect system, but it worked…sort of.  Keep in mind that during all of this, long-suffering husband Bill is trying his best to avoid saying:  “I told you not to force that door closed!”  He would be right, of course.  Still, saying it might have been life-threatening so he restrained himself.

Yeah, that’s the very long door history.  It does provide a backdrop to explain why the next part was so mortifying.  Yesterday was a ‘Wendy day’.  Wendy comes here a couple of times a week to clean and generally keep us from being the slovenly people we are.  She puts up with a lot around here.  She keeps things somewhat orderly and keeps us in our place if we mess up.  ‘Mess up’ literally and figuratively, that is.  She’s like family and I don’t know what we’d do without her.  She loves Walter, too.  That’s saying a lot right there!

Yesterday, Wendy informed me that she entered the house through the dog door.  I’m not kidding!  That door with the broken latch was locked and she couldn’t get in that way.  She could have tried getting in by the front door, with a perfect working latch I might add.  But since the snowbanks are high, she would have to walk along a very busy road to get there.  She didn’t want to park in front because the carpenters were working away on the new garage and mudroom.  This was not going to deter her.  Wendy, being the resourceful woman she is, just crawled through the dog door to get in.  Let me emphasize that she not only had to get through the dog door itself but also had crawl under a flight of stairs and through another opening.  It’s hard to describe, so see below.  Why didn’t she call and have me unlock the door?  It was because it was very early and she didn’t want to wake us up.  I know I can be frightening before I’ve had my coffee, but still!  Silly woman.

Dog door accessed under a stairway and through an opening into the back of the house.

 

Crawling through the dog door won’t happen again, thank goodness.  I still don’t believe she did it, but after today things will be much easier.  Today the carpenters are putting a hole in the side of the house.  They are cutting a great big hole in my pantry to put in a door.  We’re getting a new house hole that will be the opening for a man-sized door…or woman-sized door, as the case may be.  It will definitely be a Wendy-sized door. The new mudroom and garage are going to be accessible from the main house!  This is all very exciting but still, let’s have a moment of silence to mourn the desecration of my beloved pantry…  Sigh…

 

Meet Steve, our carpenter/designer who made this process so easy.  We are so lucky to have him.

 

Here’s Joe, Steve’s trusty sidekick.  He’s always smiling, even when he’s trying to avoid the camera!

 

So that’s the story of the house holes.  Doors, dog doors, and a new entryway.  The only thing we didn’t talk about is windows.  A window is what I’ll be thrown through if I break any more latches.