Discombobulated

I'm still feeling a little disjointed and bleary from the head cold that moved in, took my voice hostage, and plagued my holiday weekend. Today we added the fun of tearing apart our dining room to put in the new door. What never sounded simple in the first place has turned into yet another project that's left me blinking my eyes and hoping for the best.

Even disheveled and unfinished, the room looks better than ever before with the new door. If you weren't there to see the old glass bow and wobble as Ivan took it out, it will probably be hard to appreciate just how solid, safe and secure the new door looks in place.

Our house is part of the one-story, open format, ranch-style sprawl that crept across the county in the early seventies. Because it was part of this rapid expansion of tract housing construction, it has some interesting dimensions. Years of do-it-yourself-ing (in the years before Google) have added some accidental character. Case in point, someone put stucco right up to (and over) the aluminum frame of the old door, making it impossible to take out without breaking away chunks of the exterior wall's surface. This is why Ivan spent a good part of today reshaping the door opening, cutting away layers of old stucco, shaving off a little bit of wood here and there, and fitting in a new header above the door opening.

Yes, yes, I know: Pics or it didn't happen. Rather than documenting the entire process, I've opted to just take a picture of the new door when it's all over. And in a few years, we'll take a picture with the new windows... maybe resurfaced cabinets and a new counter top, too. I don't ever need to remember the old sliding door. It can slip away from memory and into the stuff of legends, keeping the polka dots and faux grapes company in the great beyond.