The Door Dork

So we have lived in this house for 12 years as of the end of April. Once the weather starts getting consistently nice in the spring, I'll go through the fairly elaborate (for me, anyway) task of replacing the glass storm door with the screen door.

Every time I have done this in the spring – and again in the fall when I switch the door back – I have gone through a process where I'll basically tear the whole door apart in order to make the switch. There are a bunch of screws involved, and some metal trim that comes off, and these little plastic corner things. I have unscrewed these things and screwed them back into place so many times that most of the screw holes are stripped, and the plastic corner things are cracked as a result of me over-tightening screws.

This isn't the most work-intensive project a man could possibly do, but it involves enough manual labor that I usually procrastinate doing it until it's really necessary. But last night I finally got motivated enough to get-r-done, so I gathered up my Phillips head screwdriver and a stepstool, and of course a can of Diet Vanilla Pepsi.

I began the fun task of removing all of the screws, and suddenly I had a mini epiphany as I looked closely at the door. It occurred to me that in order to switch the screen and glass back and forth, all I really needed to do was to pull off two rubber strips that hold the frame into place, switch things out, and call it a day. There was absolutely no reason to tear the door apart down to the molecular level, like I've been doing for more than a decade.

A drunken monkey could have figured this out and completely swapped the doors within two minutes. But not me! It has taken me 12 years to realize that this whole process takes about as much time and effort as gargling, instead of the half an hour of semi-intense labor it usually takes me.

What's worse is that there's an extremely good chance that I will forget all of this when it comes time to switch the door back to the glass in the fall. So I'm going to make a point of sticking a Post-It note to the glass. And, being realistic, I'll probably get distracted and forget to leave myself that note. Maybe I'll leave myself a note to leave myself a note…