![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Our house is what some folks these days are calling "a used house". We bought it used, and it had been well used by the builder and his family by then, used for the raising of kids and when that had stopped working, rented out to two or three people at a time for a few years.
Then we came along and rescued it -- agreed to live in it while the well was rehabilitated from an encroachment of petroleum that had leaked from the forgotten tanks of the oldest gas station in Kennebec County, and when that wouldn't work, we've lived here while they dug us a new well down on the edge of the property and then spent more than a decade getting the gas -- "the product" as one engineer insisted on calling it -- out of the old well and the environment. That, at least, was finished last year.
So the house is a well-used 30 years old house and the home-built kitchen cabinets (including the rustic split-wood rustic facade on the at the top of the very tall cabinets) have had plenty of work to do over time. I've had to fiddle with the drawer a few times over the years, including taking a bit of a kink out of the guide rail that was there when we bought the house....
Today (suddenly and without warning -- or hardly any warning, anyway) ... the "silverware" drawer broke, going all awkward and clattery and spilling a few spoons inside the bottom cabinet. The center rail guide had broken -- metal fatigue! -- and needed to be replaced. When I say metal fatigue, the tongue of the center rail was still well attached to the top bottom of the drawer opening, three sturdy screws proudly doing their jobs...
I'd been doing other work today... You know, some computer work, some writing, some PR, some scritching of cats, ... and I also designed an Allies flyer and read over a draft of someone elses PR stuff. So I was willing enough to break for the day and off I went to the hardware store (s)...where I could not find the 21 inch center rail I needed. I didn't feel like futzing with a 20 inch by adding a wooden support, so I got the 22 inch... which promptly broke my hacksaw blade (old, old blade) when I started to amend it.
So after scrounging around in the "One day I'm going to build me a railroad" cabinet I found another somewhat lighter weight hacksaw and gingerly trimmed the center guide rail to length with a blade originally bought to cut scale rail. Sigh. Not quite the same work, that.
It got cut, and *only then* did I remove the the the proud screws I mentioned before... only to discover they were sort of loose, after all, and had been embedded in wood filler...because as became rapidly obvious, the center rail has been replaced before, probably two or three times. Figure that we've lived here going on 15 years...so those first 15 years must have been very hectic indeed!
So I improvised. Rather than replacing the wood, I bracketed the mounting bracket. The bracket holding the guide wheel to the back of the drawer also needed replacing... and there were 7 holes back there. One, luckily, was right where I need one. But that means there are now *10* bracket holes on the back of the drawer, brave drawer that it is.
And you know, now that it's done, the drawer works. No squealing or squeaking, hooray! On top of that, I found the old 2-4-2 locomotive I'd lost track of, have a reason to go on a tool replacement trip at some point, and can say Hey... I finished something today!
Alas, while I was at the hardware store (s) I saw a couple interesting awning kits, and it looks like, old Dubya's understanding of the weather notwithstanding, I ought to look at some passive solar reduction techniques RSN.
There you go. A little bit about the day the day the kitchen drawer broke... ah, the writing life, one wild ride after another.
...and what's up with you?
Then we came along and rescued it -- agreed to live in it while the well was rehabilitated from an encroachment of petroleum that had leaked from the forgotten tanks of the oldest gas station in Kennebec County, and when that wouldn't work, we've lived here while they dug us a new well down on the edge of the property and then spent more than a decade getting the gas -- "the product" as one engineer insisted on calling it -- out of the old well and the environment. That, at least, was finished last year.
So the house is a well-used 30 years old house and the home-built kitchen cabinets (including the rustic split-wood rustic facade on the at the top of the very tall cabinets) have had plenty of work to do over time. I've had to fiddle with the drawer a few times over the years, including taking a bit of a kink out of the guide rail that was there when we bought the house....
Today (suddenly and without warning -- or hardly any warning, anyway) ... the "silverware" drawer broke, going all awkward and clattery and spilling a few spoons inside the bottom cabinet. The center rail guide had broken -- metal fatigue! -- and needed to be replaced. When I say metal fatigue, the tongue of the center rail was still well attached to the top bottom of the drawer opening, three sturdy screws proudly doing their jobs...
I'd been doing other work today... You know, some computer work, some writing, some PR, some scritching of cats, ... and I also designed an Allies flyer and read over a draft of someone elses PR stuff. So I was willing enough to break for the day and off I went to the hardware store (s)...where I could not find the 21 inch center rail I needed. I didn't feel like futzing with a 20 inch by adding a wooden support, so I got the 22 inch... which promptly broke my hacksaw blade (old, old blade) when I started to amend it.
So after scrounging around in the "One day I'm going to build me a railroad" cabinet I found another somewhat lighter weight hacksaw and gingerly trimmed the center guide rail to length with a blade originally bought to cut scale rail. Sigh. Not quite the same work, that.
It got cut, and *only then* did I remove the the the proud screws I mentioned before... only to discover they were sort of loose, after all, and had been embedded in wood filler...because as became rapidly obvious, the center rail has been replaced before, probably two or three times. Figure that we've lived here going on 15 years...so those first 15 years must have been very hectic indeed!
So I improvised. Rather than replacing the wood, I bracketed the mounting bracket. The bracket holding the guide wheel to the back of the drawer also needed replacing... and there were 7 holes back there. One, luckily, was right where I need one. But that means there are now *10* bracket holes on the back of the drawer, brave drawer that it is.
And you know, now that it's done, the drawer works. No squealing or squeaking, hooray! On top of that, I found the old 2-4-2 locomotive I'd lost track of, have a reason to go on a tool replacement trip at some point, and can say Hey... I finished something today!
Alas, while I was at the hardware store (s) I saw a couple interesting awning kits, and it looks like, old Dubya's understanding of the weather notwithstanding, I ought to look at some passive solar reduction techniques RSN.
There you go. A little bit about the day the day the kitchen drawer broke... ah, the writing life, one wild ride after another.
...and what's up with you?
