Innovation

We all have to get creative at times when it comes to fixing things because - face it - sometimes you have to do it yourself.  If you don't you may wait a very long time to get something done, if it ever happens.

This is the repainted door we were working on

Recently, this was true of the garage door. (the fire door between the garage and the house).  We needed to get the springs replaced in the door so it automatically shuts itself since it's a fire door.  It has to pass house inspection and that's something on the list.  We had the door taken off in October to be repainted.  We've waited for someone to come and put the hinge springs back in place since then.  We finally decided to tackle that job ourselves since it wasn't happening any other way.

What an ordeal.  What would take some expert five minutes took us half the day.  This is no easy job when you don't know what you're doing and have never done it before.  But we persevered and finally could cross it off the "to do" list.

This is the spring mechanism we had to insert the pin into.  There is one at the top and one at the bottom of the door.

 Of course, over the months one of the springs was lost.  Nobody would sell us just a spring.  We had to buy the whole mechanism.  So we put on the thinking cap and made our own.  These pins don’t exactly look like a spring, but are more like a finish nail.  They are designed to hold the spring in place, putting tension on it, so the door will close automatically. 

Naturally, we didn’t have any nails the right size, so we cut a finish nail off and with great effort got it in the hole.  And guess what?  It works!
  
Unless you've been through it, there's more to consider when selling a house than you'd think about on an ordinary day.