Day Four, Project Three, : Philips, Flat Or Flowery?

First of all , let me just say: Happy National Homeownership Month, everybody! I’ve been waiting for this ever since I first read about it in the Economist magazine, and now the moment’s finally here. Can’t you just feel the love…?

Okay, back on your heads.

Now that I’ve done it, I realize that taking a door off its hinges is not exactly a thing-a-day job. It took all of thirty seconds. But I was afraid maybe the hinges were so paint-fused together that I’d have to hit them with the 5F5, and if that had been the case I didn’t want to have to do anything else today. And I only have to do what I decide to do ahead of time -- them’s the rules. (Rules which, by the way, I’m making up as I go along and which may change later and I’ll thank you not to point it out to me if they do!).

First of all, I really should have taken the door down before I stripped the frame. But the stripping was taking so freakin’ long that I couldn’t stomach the thought of making the job any bigger. Two years is quite enough, thank you. I figured I’d get to all the un-seeable bits later (and it takes some kind of rationalization to consider the half-stripped coat-closet door, which is literally two feet -- okay maybe three feet -- from your face when you walk in the front door an un-seeable bit. But there you go). And then “later” just never came around. Until now. Damn.

I can’t back up far enough to take a full picture of the door without losing it in a busy portrait of the messiness that is my house. I tried, and what with the wood’s mottled, brown-and-white, half-stripped appearance, well, it came out looking like a pile of laundry in the corner. Or a cow. (And again I say: so long as I do one thing every day, nothing in the rules that I make up says I have to clean -- you should just be glad I don’t have real cows wandering around in here. Although I might. Who would ever know…?). So here’s at least a photo of what the half-stripped doorknob area looks like:



Not a bad looking knob, what? Every door in the house has these exact same ones. They -- whoever, somebody -- tore off the woodwork in the dining room, built an addition over the bulkhead, decorated the bathroom in Pepto-Dismal pink... but the doorknobs, all of them, they left alone. I like them, and the hardware, too. Ooh, in fact, now that I think of it, I really ought to take the hinges off, oughtn’t I?

Okay, I’ll go do that now.

Well, there’s another minute and a half down. Boy, howdy, I am really cooking! It must be this screwdriver Larry bought me…

Larry’s the fella Johnny works with. He bought this screwdriver for me because he was tired of listening to Johnny bitch about his going missing all the time. Honestly, I hated it at first. I’m not generally one for the girly-pink, do-it-herself crap If I’m going to use a tool (and believe you me, I used my share of tools when I was younger), then I want to use a proper tool. So Larry's girly screwdriver stayed in its shrink-wrapped plastic for a really very un-gratefully long time (and please, if you’ve got an explanation as to why in god’s name anyone would need to plastic-wrap a screwdriver, I sure would love to hear it).

But one day I couldn’t find the red one -- a.k.a. “Johnny’s” -- so I finally bit the bullet and unwrapped the flowers. It turns out it’s not so bad. It turns out it’s actually an honest tool. It’s just that it’s all pink and flowery. Which means Johnny won’t touch it. Which means the flowers actually turn out to be a good thing. So now I keep it in my nightstand drawer (so I always know where I can find it) and I use it for everything. Well, not everything -- not “nightstand-drawer” kind of everything, for example. In fact, ew. Now that I’ve had that thought, maybe I should try to find Larry's girly screwdriver another home...

Anyway, aside from it’s intended purpose I have used this flowery thing for stripping paint (it gets the detail of the decorative woodwork better than a stripping tool) for opening beer bottles (but that’s not really fair, I can open beers with anything: spoons, cigarette lighters, magazines, seat belts, table tops, maracas -- wait, seat belts? How did that one get in here? No, no, I would never do something as unsmafe as that... Okay, fine, yes, I did it. I opened a beer bottle with a safety belt. It's not like I was driving. And besides. I really was younger once, you know). And now I’ve used Larry’s -- oh, hell, I might's well just admit it -- my girly screwdriver for prying painted-on hinge pins off of closet doors. I do believe I’ve actually come to love its power-puffiness.

Here’s a picture of it:


Oh, yeah, and that pile in the corner of the shot? Those are the hinges and screws I just took off the door. And that’s probably where they’ll stay until I get around to stripping them: right there on the corner of my desk. So there. I’m the rule-maker-upper of this here manifesto!

Oh all right, fine, I’ll go get a coffee can. But if I can’t find them when I need them, then I’m holding you responsible. You and your stanky keep-the-house-clean rules …

Day Four: Accomplished
Total Time Spent: Seriously, about a minute and a half. Let’s be generous and call it three. Or, as Prince would have it: III.
Total cost: Nothing, nothing, nothing!
Frilly, girly screwdriver that Larry gave me: Priceless