Usually, I'm at home for a little bit in the morning, and by the time I get
home from work it's dark, and I can't see the dust in the corners and the cracks in the walls of the
house, and I'm too tired to be interested in impromptu
home improvement projects. After living with all the crookednesses and imperfections for the past few months, we've been wondering whether we'd overpaid for it. We bought it in April at the height of the local
real estate market boom, when any ad you found in the paper was for a house that was already sold. We ended up buying an oversized
1908 semi-
Victorian with all major systems in working order, but still in need of serious
TLC.
We've been keeping a lot of the radiators turned off to cut down on our heating oil use, but this backfired on Friday when a radiator valve in the bathroom (which had been leaking only gently) abruptly gave way, releasing several gallons of water into the guts of the bathroom floor, which proceeded to leak profusely into the kitchen, forming a dripping eight feet of (formerly) drywall seam. After an emergency call to a random plumber from the yellow pages, my husband figured out that if we opened up the valve, the leaking stopped. Emergency averted for now.
Because I've been spending more daylight hours at home over the holidays, I've been noticing lots of little things that don't make themselves known or seen in the evening when all those cracks and smudges are hidden by darkness. This morning, I decided, again in an attempt to save heat, to fix the latch on the attic door. Because the door doesn't really close securely without being locked, the cats have figured out how to open it in order to hang out in our carpeted but unheated attic. All the heat that usually pools on the second floor has been escaping upstairs through the open door. I removed the old door latch and opened up the case. I also removed and opened a working door latch from the bedroom that we use as an office, thinking that if the first one was irreparable, I could just switch them. No go on the switch -- the channel in the office door won't accomodate the lockset from the attic door.
When I open both locksets, I discovered that a spring was missing in the one for the attic, and it prevented the latch from extending into its neutral, "door closed" position. I painstakingly fashioned one from an old bobby pin. It worked! It obediently retracted with a turn of the doorknob and popped back out on release.
I reinstalled both locksets in triumph, only to discover that the strike plate on the attic doorframe is positioned in such a way that the latch can't set into the hole in the frame, so the door still won't stay shut! My husband says, in an "I told you so" sort of way, that the door has warped enough to move the latch out of alignment --it's only by a measly millimeter, but it's enough to prevent the latch from snapping into place. More wasted effort. Argh.