Home ownership is a process in which you pay, handsomely and repeatedly, for the failures of others.
This may sound like a pessimistic conclusion to draw, but it does cut to the heart of the human experience, doesn’t it? So many of our attempts to make the world a better place revolve around correcting the choices of those that came before us. Choices that, with a few decades of hindsight, seem ludicrous. Like not putting any insulating material behind the walls of a house. Or building a house at the bottom of a slope but not accounting for drainage. Or building a house with an attic and forgetting to put in any sort of access to get in to said attic.
Note to self: check my attic for treasure. Clearly they were hiding something.
Well, the choices of yesterday become the problems of today. And we’ll tackle them one by one. I might even blog about them. But today, I’m going to focus on one very minor change we decided to make to our little domicile.
With three cats, it becomes important to secret away litter boxes to an undetectable corner of the house. The goal being to prevent guests from recognizing that we are playing host a trio of odor-generating food processors. Once we moved into a house with a basement, the proper location for the Poop Zone became clear. But this means that we have to keep the basement door slightly ajar, because the cats cannot turn door knobs (yet) and probably wouldn’t be bothered to shut the doors behind themselves.
This isn’t a great long term solution for the sake of both safety and aesthetics. The accepted solution to this problem is to embed a door within the door, for use by small furry animals exclusively. For a seasoned homeowner and handy man, this is a trivial task. As I am neither of those things, it was kind of an ordeal.
This commercial cat door comes in two pieces. The front piece is a small frame and contains the actual flap. The back is just an empty frame, meant to simply cover the whole you cut in the door.
First, we start by drawing a frame around the area of the door which will become void, by tracing out the inner frame of the pet door. Drill large holes in the corners to accommodate a jigsaw blade. Then jigsaw out the hole. This would be straightforward if not for a few complications.
1. Interior doors are mostly hollow, but have struts of solid wood running through them intermittently. I opted to leave the bottom inch of the door intact. This proved to be the correct choice: it was solid wood down there.
2. The width of the door is just about equal to the throw of my jigsaw blade. It’s close enough to cause a real mess if you aren’t careful.
3. My jigsaw is corded, and the proximity to the floor meant I couldn’t cut vertically upwards from the lower holes, because the power cord was too intrusive. If I were legit I would have taken the door off of the hinge and mounted it on horses to work flat. Hindsight.
4. The veneer (this layer on the surface that makes a door look like real wood) splinters like a motherfucker when jigsawed, especially the opposite side from the jigsaw (maybe because of #2).
Despite all of these problems, I managed to slice out a rectangular chunk of the door for the front side of the cat door, which fit perfectly and covered up the minor chipping I had. The back was a mess, but meh, it’s dark on that side.
Not too shabby. Now to put the rear side in and…it doesn’t fit. Remember that second side I mentioned? Well, the inner flange is significantly larger than the opening for the front side. So that perfectly fitting hole I cut out is actually too small. Why? Why why why why why. Why. This means I have to widen the hole on both dimensions to fit in the piece that otherwise has no functional value. And that means the hole for the front side is now going to be slightly large.
Now I have to saw out the back-side hole to make it larger. Which thanks to #4 meant that my pretty front facing hole was soon turned into a splintered mess, and the hole wound up being over-sized to the point where one of the screws didn’t have anything to screw into.
What began as a minor home improvement project soon turned into a life lesson on accepting imperfection. For a denizen of the digital world, this is a tough pill to swallow. My craft is based in the imaginary world of ones and zeros. If I don’t like something, I have the opportunity to change it. Over and over again. At no cost. Nothing has any meaning until I decide it’s perfect enough to send out into the world. This post, for instance. How many proofreads and grammar fixes did I have to do? Nothing was permanent.
Now, what if I never could make edits or fix typos? What if the first draft was the only draft? That’s what home improvement is like. There’s no Ctrl-Z. Every mistake becomes a fixture. Edges will be rough. Details will be missed. You have to live with imperfection, or you will go stark raving mad. Or, worse, you get scared and stop trying. I’m going to see that cracked veneer every time I walk down that hallway, and it will hound me until I learn this lesson.
-K