It is not surprising that my most viewed Hubs by a huge margin are two of the How To pages, namely How To Dig A Hand Dug Well (solidly in first place) and How To Build A Survival Cabin On A Shoestring Budget (in second place, not about to beat the Well Hub but far, far ahead of #3). Moreover, since Pam and I are once again living a "homesteading" lifestyle, there are many How To projects in need of completion and thus many opportunities to document those via digital camera. Finally, handyman work and/or building projects come fairly naturally to me.

With all that, perhaps a changeup Hub admitting a comedy of errors requiring a project do-over...I messed up, okay? Brain cloud. Duh. Or as Homer Simpson would say, "D'oh!" Here's what happened.

Without question, battening down the hatches for the soon-to-happen Arizona monsoons required replacing the outside front door (not the screen door) on our aging camp trailer. Other structures that could be quick-fixed were already squared away, and it was time to do the door thingie. Thinking through just how to get it done produced a list of needed building materials followed by nearly three hours spent poring through available goodies at the Home Depot store in Sierra. There are two other big box home improvement stores in the area plus a lumber yard per se, but Home Depot is both the closest and, in my highly biased opinion, the best.

The exteme time expenditure was partly due to needing to figure out which woods and hardware would actually do the job. Cost was equally important. Slow and careful study several times included finding a store employee who could provide a price check on this or that piece of plywood or package of screws. Those price checks paid off: Of three types of panels that could have worked for door skins, for example, the cost per panel ranged from $11 up to $45.

It wasn't all that early in the day when I got home, but the project kept calling, "Build me! Build me!" The only logical procedure seemed to involve putting the door together on the ground. Most likely only a start could be made before dark, but still....

Since the ground where we live is about as far from soft lawn grass as can be imagined, a tarp was first put down to protect the door wood from becoming filthy and/or scratched. Likewise, since this area has nearly constant wind, five gallon bottles of water were placed on the corners of the tarp to keep it from heading for Kansas. The door skins had been precut to size by a Home Depot employee; all that remained for me to do was cut the 1 3/8" x 1 3/8" framing pieces to length, drill pilot holes, and start screwing things down tight. Smoo-ooth.

One generally foolproof method is to begin with one screw at one corner. With that secured, the second screw is placed at the opposite end. This procedure is amended when the framing stick is less than perfectly straight; in that case , the screws are placed one after another, marching down the door skin. A bit of pressure is usually sufficient with such small dimension lumber to produce a completely straight finished product.

The first clue that something was not quite right involved just such a situation. Close inspection revealed my error: Although I'd marked one of the three "sticks" at the time of purchase with the letters "T & B", meaning that stick was scheduled to be cut in shorter across-the-door pieces utilized at "Top & Bottom". It did have a slight bend to it, which I'd spotted during the selection process. Short chunks would come out looking perfectly straight. A good plan...until I forgot all about doing that and grabbed the bent stick without thinking.

Still, no big. Things were progressing nicely (I thought), and the smoky pall hanging over Sierra Vista from wildfires in the Huachuca Mountains even conspired to produce a pretty orange sunset. Good times; not even the need to put on a leather glove to protect my screwdriver wielding right hand could dampen my enthusiasm. Yup, going to be a beautiful door when done....

Leave it to Pam to bring me back to Earth by asking if I thought I should check out the new door's size against the actual door opening. Well, double duh. On a non-brain-cloud day, I would have done that with the precut door skin(s) before ever cutting the first framing stick. So of course I thanked my redhead, grabbed the door skin which now had the two full length sticks firmly attached with screws every 8 inches or so, and headed over to the camp trailer.

Oops.

The findings leaped out in dramatic fashion:

1. The new door was clearly too narrow by about an inch and a half.

2. The hinge-side stick should have been extending out that exact inch and a half, as originally planned, with that extension eventually to slide into a steel mounting channel existing as original equipment on the camper.

3. If the 1 3/8" x 1 3/8" stick were to stick out an inch and a half, it would miss the door skin(s) entirely by 1/8".

Well, foo. The only thing to do is to head back to Home Depot tomorrow, shooting down the hope of avoiding having to put those 40 additional miles of wear and tear on the Subaru and all that fuel through the carburetor. There were some silver linings: The right precut door skins fit the door opening pretty well (yes, I checked). The long sticks that were cut to the wrong length can still become part of the finished product by being cut once again and serving as reinforcing crossmembers, while the wrong "door skin" does precisely fit over the windows it was originally designed to cover. Not quite "no harm, no foul", but close enough for company work.

And yes, the botched first attempt did provide a golden opportunity for a Hub in which yours truly could blush in public.

Thanks for reading,

Ghost32