The trouble with doors

You may remember the $2,000 door fiasco at the Placitas house. If not, never mind. I’m trying to forget about it. Water under the bridge – that house is SOLD.

You also may also remember that we’re trying to add a door from the master bedroom to our new side courtyard at our current house. I bought the door back in June or July, but it turned out I bought the wrong door. I didn’t know that we have 6″ jamb rather than for 4″ construction. So we had to return the door. Turns out Home Depot doesn’t stock the type we need, so we special-ordered a replacement door and waited forever for it to arrive.

The special-order door finally arrived, right before we left for a few days in Tucson. Our carpenter, Calob, said he’d pick up and install the door while we were gone. It sounded too good to be true. We’d just come home and have a new door all ready and waiting?

Calob is very talented, but things often take a little longer than he expects. So John and I made bets about whether he would actually have the door done by the time we got back home (we didn’t think so). The day before we were due home, I got an email from Home Depot letting me know that the door had been picked up. That’s progress at least.

Of course the door wasn’t actually installed when we got home. But Calob had cut into the interior wall and rerouted some wires that were in the way. The next day, he cut into the exterior stucco. Now we had a big hole in our house.

But when Calob went to install the door, he discovered that Home Depot had sent the wrong door. It was another 4″ door! And I had spent twice as much to get the 6″ spec.

Here’s a picture of a piece of drywall resting over the door-sized hole in the house. We got a short but furious rain shower during the time that Calob was off at Home Depot returning the door.

After returning the door, and we were left facing the prospect of reordering the same door again, waiting another 3 weeks, and hoping they would send the right door this time.

Luckily the Home Depot guy felt bad for us, and gave us the phone number of a local door company where we could order a door. So we called the local company and they can get us the same door for significantly cheaper! It’s still going to take 2-3 weeks though.

Calob installed a piece of plywood over the hole while we wait for our (3rd) new door to arrive.

Looks like I’ve got some clean up I can do while I wait.