Red's Blog

I’m sitting around the house thinking of some of the things I would like to do to improve the place. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t consider my house to be a dump or even in disrepair. I do find myself looking at the place and wondering what the hell I could do to make it more ours and less builder standard.

Then I began to think of all the small repairs I had done and wondered if I was committing homeowner sins by not fixing the problem and not the symptom. For example, I recently made some repairs to some interior doors that were pulling away from the door jambs. The screws holes were stripped out and in one case, only one screw was holding the door on. So I used what I had available to me at 9:30pm: drywall anchors. I thought it was a match made in heaven. They were the perfect size and once installed, seemed very secure. But there was a nagging feeling that this ghetto fix was not the best choice. If I were to seek my dad’s advice, I would need to remove the jambs, replace with hardwood and not particle board, and use a 3 1/2″ screw to anchor it into the studs.

Now I feel that I have set myself up for future mishaps. Replacing all the interior doors and jambs with solid wood counterparts was on my list of things that I would like to do for the house, but ultimately a tough sell to the wife. It’s going to be tough to convince her that I want to take all the doors out and put new ones in that look, feel and work just like the old ones to the tune of several thousand dollars.

At least then, I won’t have to repair a stripped out door jamb again.