Welcome again to Saturday Morning Home Repair blogging, where we talk about fixing houses and the things in them that are supposed to work for us. An ad hoc cadre of building professionals and gifted amateurs attempt to answer questions that arise from readers, and offer encouragement and advice for those inclined to do things for themselves, if they can. We all do a lot of things, collectively, and can probably help out with insights from our vast experience. Or sometimes, we just gab.
Sorry, no pictures this morning. My cloud drive is offline and I don’t have time to mess with it. Also, sorry if I’m usurping someone else’s slot, I just saw that there wasn’t a diary up.
Anyway, the garage door. As you may remember, our dauntless heroine was rehabbing a rental house when we last heard from her. She was getting near the end of the project and had even started showing it to prospective tenants. One of the last things that had to be done is send through the commercial cleaning crew to make it fresh and sparkly for the showings.
Then, something small turned into something large. I messed up and left the remotes for the garage door opener in a kitchen drawer rather than taking them with me. And the cleaners, cleaning the insides of the drawers and cabinets, didn’t know what they were and threw them away. I didn’t realize they were gone until the trash had been collected. Argh.
Not the end of the world, you say. You can get universal garage door opener remotes at Home Depot. Yes, you can. But you have to have access to the opener to program them, and unfortunately, the only access to the garage is the main door. There are a side door and a window, but the side door was warped and a previous tenant secured it closed on the inside with angle iron. There was no way into the garage.
I called a garage door repairman. This was going to cost me $150, but I had no reasonable alternative. He arrived and I noticed he was already in a foul mood. I have no idea what his problem was.
There was an external opener-release thingy, but it required a key I've never had since I bought this house out of foreclosure a decade ago. He drilled it out and was going to use a wire bent into a hook to release the opener. Flash forward an hour and a half (he claimed he'd never had this much problem releasing one. It usually takes about five minutes). No joy. He just couldn't hook the pull cord. Then he slipped, the wire came whipping out of the hole and gave him a nasty cut across the hand. He left with the garage door still closed after bleeding a bit on my driveway. (I really do feel bad about him hurting himself, but I suspect the problem was less the unopenability of my door and more that something was going on with him before he arrived.)
So, my garage had been rendered into a fairly uninteresting sculpture at the end of my driveway by the loss of a $19 remote fob.
The next day, while I considered my next move, an annoying neighbor sauntered up. I won’t go into why I say he’s annoying, but let me just say it has something to do with obsessive mansplaning.
But, a little light went on in my head and I turned to him and said, “How’d you like to break into my garage?”
My idea was to pull the sash out of the window and have him climb in and release the opener. That didn’t work because the sash had been painted shut numerous times over the last 50 years. However, we did get the glazing out from around the glass and he climbed in. Voila! My garage was openable again.
I gave him $50 and he left happy.
Next, I’m going to get my regular construction guy to get the side door working again, so we never have this problem again.
What’s happening in your world?