The Lowest of the Lowes

[captainsblog]

Not long before we left Rochester in 1994, we replaced our front storm door with a Forever Door. It came as a small comfort that this house also had a fairly new one of that brand, which did not need replacing. However, we have discovered that my mother was only partially right when she uttered one of her many Mom-list cliches:

Forever is a long time.

No, Ma, in this case, forever is something in the vicinity of 18-20 years.

The handle's been wonky for years. The inner side of it is connected to the base by a set screw that long ago outlived its useful life, and we've been hearing it fall off, and then reassembling it and resetting the screw, every month or so. That is, until we doubled the opposable-thumb-bearing population of this house recently, when it got to be an every-week and, lately, an everyday occurrence.   Even I began to sit up and take notice, and so, two days ago, I removed the handle from the door (or, more likely, the floor where the fecker had fallen again) and set out to our local small Towne hardware store to get a replacement.

This, apparently, is how Ishmael and Don Quixote started out, looking, respectively, for seafood and cooling fans.

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In my travels yesterday, I made my first try. Ed Youngs no gots, but they referred me to Valu. I tried them on my way back from the gym at 9-something this morning; they didn't have it, either, but the guy just as quickly sent me to Hector's.  All of these Tru-Valueish solos and local chains seem determined to keep each other in business and will kick customers back and forth among each other as long as they don't give anything to a Big Box (caja grande) determined to kill (matar) them all.  Hector was strike three, and the guy there ultimately drove me to the Internet; they at least had a so-called universal replacement handle, but I had no idea if it would fit our door.

So I googled "Forever door" and "replacement parts" autofilled itself right in. "I'm feeling lucky" produced a 72-page .pdf from, who else?, Home Despot.  There, on page 54, was something vaguely resembling what we had:



So I put my anti-corporatist feelings aside and made Visit Number Four.  Surprise, surprise, they didn't have any of their parts available, either, and their only close compatible was a gold-plated beast that I think used to guard Jim and Tammy Faye Bakers' toilet.

By now, though, there was only one choice left: Lowe's. Where everything (todos los cosas) are bilingual, virtually doubling the effort to find jack shit in there.  (I'm as un-xenophobic as it comes, but do you REALLY think Latinos and Latinas are too stupid to know that "enter" means "entrada?")  Of course the doors were in Aisle 48, and the hardware was halfway across the store from the new doors, but, God bless me, I found a semi-universal one there, in a neutral color, for 12 bucks less than Arthur "Shooting" Blanks wanted to sell it to me for at the last stop.

Eleanor is now trying to actually install the thing, in keeping with the natural order of things around here. (We told Emily, from infancy on: "Mommy spatial, Daddy verbal.")  The instructions were totally inconsistent with the condition of the parts in the box, which flummoxed me no end, but my beloved is awesome at such things. And yes, while she swelters on the stoop, I'm in here blogging about it, because I am well aware of the standard rates for such things:



I suppose it's only appropriate, because after all this is July 14th, on which the French peasants stormed the Bastille (el Bastillo) because the lock on the main gate fell off.

Comments

[bill_sheehan.livejournal.com]

I picked the wrong parents. I was clearly meant to pick up the phone and order other people to perform home repairs, but somehow I never got that trust fund or bequest to enable my innate abilities.