One door opens!....and closes!

For 23 years, the door between our garage and back porch has failed to close.

Much like the painted cinder block wall that surrounds it, it was easy to overlook. For a the longest time, our garage was mostly a storage area and it was only when I got the convertible that we cleared the space out to better preserve my baby. So for the past seven years or so, it's been a minor annoyance that the door won't close.

The wall, frankly, was more annoying, but only when I looked out through the kitchen window or spent time out there. Two of the walls are screens/glass. The other is the outside brick. Even the ceiling is better than that wall -- it's varnished wood that kind of looks like the hull of a ship.

I disguised the ugly wall with with Alison's artwork for a while. I once tried to cover it with cork panels. It takes a lot of cork board to cover just under 12.5K square feet of wall space. I'm just glad I started with a small sample size because once I got one strip of cork squares up, they all started to slide down the wall, none would adhere. Probably because it was too ugly to cling to.

For the past couple years, I've papered over the wall with Christmas wrapping paper during the holidays. That actually looks better than you'd think, but it's obviously a temporary measure.

Jeff has refused to invest in my plan to put wallboard over the concrete until I scrape the column-y like spaces between the windows. In another failed home improvement project, I painted them once. I used the wrong kind of paint, apparently, because it quickly peeled. I don't remember how long it lasted, but I pass it off as shabby chic to everyone but Captain Reed who feels I should have done more research before slapping on the paint.

The porch is in a bit of no man's land, getting neither heat nor cooling. Moisture seeps in through the screens and windows, so it's difficult to get excited about really fixing it up. Usually, I just turn my back on the wall and hold the door closed with a small decorative brick when I think of it.

So only just about every day, the door hands a bit ajar and the wall stands there waiting to glare at me whenever I walk through the kitchen and glimpse it through the Dutch door that connects the porch to the house.

Until today.

Leading up to and during her graduation party prep, guests had used our old sidewalk chalk to leave Alison messages. She and her friend, Nikki, had drawn all over the door and wall.

I'm determined to cover the wall with wine crate panels, but have to clean the wall before Jeff will be happy about ordering the wine panels I need for the project.

Ali and I were wiping off the chalk when I started playing with and talking about calling a handyman to replace the door -- the option Jeff believed we'd need to do. My quick Internet research showed me that it could cost $500.

But as I fiddled with the door, my future scientist said, "I looks like that's loose up there. Maybe that's the problem."

The screws on the top hinge WERE loose. I tightened them and the door swung better but still wouldn't close. We looked at the knob.

"Isn't there supposed to be a thing there?" she asked, pointing to the latch, which was, indeed, missing the protruding part of the hardware.

"Huh," I said and silently thanked (again) Amil Gelb, who'd designed our house and left behind all sorts of things in the basement.

We'd taken down some of the doors, but as Reeds are wont to do, we kept them. Because of course, why wouldn't you keep spare doors? Jeff has used a couple of them as tables -- screwing on spare legs that Amil had, of course, left behind.

Sure enough, I found a door that had a latch mechanism I could remove. We had to remove the entire door knob to get the poor-performing door's latch mechanism out.

Once that was done, though, it was pretty simple to insert the new one and screw it back into place. We share a moment of mother-daughter high when the door snicked securely into place.

Who needs a handyman? Not us. We're handywomen. And I just made $500 toward my wine crate panel project.

Boo-yah.

Yeah. I know. For 23 years, I had completely missed the fact that the door latch was broken. I didn't say I am an observant handywoman. Let's focus on the fact that I saved TeamReed $500.