This week is not super exciting. There is currently a heatwave going through and it is apparently unseasonably warm. According to Wikipedia (not super reliable but hey), “The hottest month is July, with an average high of 82 °F or 27.8 °C and average low of 66 °F or 18.9 °C, with conditions usually humid. Periods exceeding 90 °F or 32.2 °C in summer or below 10 °F or −12.2 °C in winter are not uncommon, but rarely prolonged.” We are at about a week of the high exceeding 90°. This is sad news for us as the house has no air conditioning. We bought the girls a window A/C unit so they could sleep. The master bedroom, however, is so large (~875 sqft) and has the wrong style windows. So, we either need two small portable A/C units or to pay to have a ductless A/C unit installed. The one issue with getting the girls an A/C unit is that their bedroom door wouldn’t latch. And so the problem solving, googling, and texts to Dad began.

Fixing a Door

Now, I really love the door handles and doors in the house. And I am fairly certain that they are original to the house, at least in the original portions of the house. This certainty is derived from the style of the handles, latching, and locking mechanisms, as well as, the warping in some of the doors. Due to age, settling of the house, warping of the door, and the painting over of the mechanisms very few of said doors actually latch or close. The doors in the original portions of the house all have Mortise style latching and locking mechanisms. I am also fairly sure that the doorknobs and face-plates are copper or bronze. In order to not have the A/C unit for the girls room constantly running I needed to get their door to latch. So after some initial investigating, the first step was to clean off the latching and locking mechanisms as they were COVERED in paint. Doing so involved some googling of how to remove the entire mechanism from the door to gain access.

After removing the door mechanisms, which involved some use of an exact-o knife to cut paint, and some preemptive picture of ho everything went together. The door mechanism was free! You can see below that the door latch was actually so covered in paint that it was getting stuck inside the door. Once the paint was scraped off and it could fully release it worked amazingly.

Well…the mechanism worked great BUT it didn’t quite reach the strike-pad. Sigh. More googling and armed with several options I texted Dad to ask his opinion. After several back and forths and many pictures of the door, gaps, and mechanisms later it was decided to first try shimming the strike-pad.

And so I began the process of shimming the strike-pad. I decided to use cardboard to shim it at least temporarily for now because it is cheap and easy for testing. I ended up shimming the strike-pad about a centimeter to get the latch to reach it decently. AND… it still didn’t latch. Sigh. I investigated even further because at this point it SHOULD be latching. I couldn’t figure out why it wouldn’t latch. Then I looked at the wear on the strike-pad. And I realized that the wear was a little close to the top of the hole for the latch. So I filed down the top of the latch hole. AND… it latched! Finally, after 3 days of messing with the door it closed fully! And just in time as the A/C unit arrived that day.

It still takes a little bit of finesse to get the door to latch, which I think I know how to fix but it works for now so yay! The girls have been sleeping so much better since the A/C was installed its been lovely.

Unpacking

When not fixing the door I have been mostly focused on cleaning and unpacking a bit. The downstairs bathroom and master bathroom have both been deep cleaned and their drawers lined. Both have also had a few things unpacked into them. The linen closet has had it’s shelves lined and things placed into it. The girls drawers were lined and we started putting their clothes in their room and a few toys and books. I only recently started going through some of the books on the shelves in the master bedroom to make room for our books and to clean the dirty dirty shelves.

Berry Hunt

Our last adventure for this week was a berry hunt. There are stories of going into the woods behind the house and picking blueberries and putting them in pails. So everyone dressed in long sleeves and pants and we went for a traipse in the woods searching for berries. We sadly didn’t find anything and concluded that we would have to try again later with someone who knows where they used to be.

Other Fun Find

I also found another piece of green glassware. And since I now have a black light I tested it to see if it was uranium glass! And it was! How cool is that! It may or may not be Depression glass. Depression glass was only a small portion of glassware that overlapped with when uranium glass was being made.

As always, thanks for reading and joining our adventures! We are going to be working on hopefully clearing out some of the garage next week.

Lots of Love,

The McMullins