A somewhat odd fact about the living space at Purgatory is that we have many exterior doors for both the house and studio buildings. The house has a total of 8 doors–six sliding glass doors, the front doors and the silly swing door in the kitchen. The studio originally had four doors–two sliding, the double French doors on the west side, and another silly swing door, but when we had the great flood in that building, part of the renovations involved getting rid of that silly swing door. Here are pics of the studio’s doors:
And the house’s doors:
The north hallway and master bedroom have single-sliding doors, but the north office has a double-sliding door, as the glass spans what was originally the house’s garage door opening. The total width with both doors open is eight feet–half of the total expanse of glass.
Another oddity is in the kitchen which has both a large sliding glass door and a silly swing door. The POs were super proud of this; when we viewed the place, they explained at length how they added it and how it made life so much easier. We found it to be the opposite–sure, in warm weather just being able to push to enter from the outside was convenient, but the door was prone to being pushed open by the wind if it wasn’t locked, and even if locked, the draft coming through was significant during colder weather. In the end, we found that the easiest fix was simply to seal the thing up.
Maybe in the future we’ll remove the door completely and just have a window in the space, but for now sealing it s a great solution to an annoying issue.
Lastly, there are two large sliding doors in the great room–one of which is a whopping 9 feet tall.
And now the reason I thought to write this post. As I’m sure readers find this random explanation of our doorways interesting and all, it really is just a long-winded lead-up to the really interesting bit of home improvement (although sealing up the swing door in the kitchen is rather noteworthy).
But back to the reason for this post. During the furnace replacement, one of the workers damaged a guide rail for the sliding door in the master bedroom. Nothing awful, but it made opening or closing the door difficult.
By August 2018 though, it was really starting to annoy us, so I did the usual research and found A1 Ontrack and a couple of techs came out a few days later. In almost no time they had the door apart, a new guide rail and rollers installed, and everything back together. The door can now be opened and closed with just one finger. It’s glorious.
I liked the work the guys from A1 Ontrack did so much, we had them out again to see to the other doors. Soon enough, the double-sliding door in the south office and the kitchen door all had new rollers and were equally easy to open and close. They also made some minor adjustments to the great room doors. (We’ll have the north hallway door serviced once the shelter-and-stay order is lifted.)
The interesting bit we learned from all these doors getting adjusted and serviced is that the doors, all Arcadia brand, are actually the sort of doors normally installed in commercial environments. Why the POs decided to go with such an option we will never know, but it fits the pattern: when they had extra money and did some sort of remodeling project they went a little crazy, but when things weren’t so flush it was band-aids to hold things together, which they then never removed and fixed properly.
Now the good thing about having such doors is they seal against the elements quite well. They also make the house even quieter, but considering our nearest neighbor is several hundred yards away, it’s not like this really matters.
Perhaps the most interesting tidbit is that the POs didn’t put such nice quality doors in the studio building–just your standard run-of-the-mill inexpensive aluminum doors. When they built it, they didn’t install a metal sill for the French doors, so that was of course rotting out and we replaced it with a nice metal one during the first round of dry-rot repairs.
So there you have it: a very long-winded story about doors.