I had very little to do with any of this. Except I went to the Home Depot 5 times this weekend. I’ve been waiting for my next door neighbor, a master carpenter, to be free to work for me on Saturdays. After 4 false starts I was starting to get pissed (but this is what contractors do, right?)
So what happened? The bathroom door! This is the only one that won’t be in the way of the floor finishing. It’s also the one I really want. I can always say, “Stay downstairs, I’m taking a shit.” But having a door brings the place to a new level of classiness. Up to below-average!
And…. he put up the rim lock! I took like 30 photos of this door. Here’s another for you. I took like 30. And opened and close the door about 100 times.
So you know my house is old. My walls are weird thicknesses. My doors are from Philadelphia Salvage and they’re not square and they’re weird thicknesses too. So when I say custom, I mean building jambs for crooked doors installed in crooked walls over crooked floors. He said, “Ya buys couldn’t frame fer shit.” I said, “Who?” and he snapped back, “You and yer father.” But how much can you expect of a civil engineer and a financial analyst?
Also, I realized to my horror that I had neglected to get a decent set of hinges for this door. So check out his craftsmanship going around the bathroom floor and my stupidity of having him install a broken hinge. The upper one is whole, so this is something we can figure out later.
Then it was on to the windows. He asked how I wanted them built. How to finish the edges, how far out beyond the trim to bring them. Totally custom work is not fun for someone who has no idea how to deal with blank slates. So my answer was a trip to the basement. “Build them like these.”
And here’s what I got! Remember how I said the house is crooked? The windows aren’t. It makes for an interesting look.
And he’s pre-cut the trim for the sides of the windows downstairs. I don’t have the materials for the headers but we can pretend. Also, I wanted to make the headers of all the windows and doors toward the back of the house line up. The one window in the kitchen was too low, so the trim steps up. You can see here how that worked out.
I’m thinking that if I put up blinds, no one will ever know that I cheated the trim up to match the others. Much better than ripping the brick out to raise the lintel, eh?
Oh. And remember how my living room became a disaster? This job got it there again. I swept up a half dozen shovels of sawdust today and called it good enough. And one more shot because my mind is blown that this man can build jambs that fit every bit of crooked perfectly and slide right into place. The smoke smell had better not linger though.
Chad's Crooked House 