Six months in and the bottom fell out.

We were playing outside a few days ago, the weather having turned so very nice that we just could not continue with indoor projects for another minute and had spent the day, instead, running around in the backyard sunshine. After stepping inside briefly to gather refreshments for the children, I tried to close the back door behind me on my way back out and found that it would not close. Like every person who finds a door stuck, I tried again and again to close it, looking all around the opening to see if there was something blocking its progress, but nothing could be seen from outside. When I poked my head in a perplexing sight met my eyes: the bottom had, quite literally, fallen out of the door.

The door I speak of is a metal, insulated exterior door, relatively new compared to the rest of the house. Such doors have wooden spacers at the top, bottom, and sides to hold the insulation in and give the door framework upon which to place the metal. It was the bottom piece of wood that we found on the floor. Why had it fallen out? Ah, funny you should ask! It fell out because the duct tape that was holding it up inside of the door finally gave out. We didn't even know the duct tape was there because the previous owners had painted it to match the door. So many things in this house are just this way: a cob job to hold things together just long enough. It is frustrating, but we knew when we bought the house that there would likely be many offenses of this nature. As Brendan so aptly put it, "I don't like it when the house chooses the projects for me".

Truthfully, we knew the back door was messed up or at least improperly installed, because there was a giant gust of air spewing from it each cold winter night. It was, most definitely, "on the list". This week it got moved up a few notches in priority. You cannot simply go buy a new door and install it the same day, or at least we cannot, so for the time being we have used our stash of packing tape to shore up the bottom which looks pretty terrible. And embarrassing. But we are learning that this old house ownership is a process, that things do not get done in one week, one month, or one year. We are learning to pace ourselves and that is a valuable lesson learned.