Moving VIII: Door

This weekend past, as there was no sign of the promised bedroom door, I finally rolled over to Home Despot and purchased 100 feet of speaker wire.  Used in conjunction with an existing optical cable I’d squirreled away, this allowed me to make good on my long-contemplated plan to hook Eve into my stereo tuner, and then connect the tuner to the stereo speakers in the living room, by running the wires through the bedroom door aperture and behind the bookcases.  (This elaborate arrangement was unnecessary in my old apartment, where the computer was in the living room, and there was nothing separating the living room from the kitchen.)  It took some doing, but it proved successful in the end, giving me access to both radio and digital music through a much wider area of the apartment, and improving my mood considerably.

Naturally, in consequence, the bedroom door was installed today.  It’s a bi-fold hollow-core closet door, custom-tailored to the frame, and a decent job;  it opens smoothly, folds well out of the way when open, and closes snugly, except at the top, where there is an unavoidable finger-width gap on the right hand side because the frame is crooked.  It looks very clean and pretty on the outside, in the hallway (since that would be the side facing into the room were it installed on a closet, as intended), and very dirty and in need of a paint job on the inside, in the bedroom.  There is also no way to close it completely from the bedroom side, except by grabbing the tiny hinges and tugging.  I cannot currently think of any type of handle that could be attached to the inside surface that would not also prevent the door from folding correctly when it’s open.

The bottom of the door is flush with the carpet, which may prevent me from running the stereo wires underneath it, or more likely, will result in them interfering with the door’s operation if I do.  But I intend to try.

The same person who installed the bedroom door also installed a much needed piece of weatherstripping under the front door (closing the inch and a half wide gap there), and evaluated the status of the kitchen lamp with an eye towards replacing it, a surprise addition to the agenda that the landlady sprung on me only this morning.  Reading between the lines:  she’s either been up here in the apartment since I moved in, or she’s observing me from outside, or someone else is observing me from outside and reporting back to her, because she’s somehow become aware that I’m using a halogen torchlight in the kitchen, and is none too thrilled about it.  (Her aversion to them, as she expresses it, stems not from any personal negative experiences with them, but from being told by somebody younger and male in her family that they were a safety hazard.)  I explained to her that replacing the lamp would only duplicate the existing problem–  the light behind you making your cast shadow fall on the work surfaces–  and outlined my plan for track lighting that shines directly down.  She passed that information along to the door guy.  He didn’t replace the lamp, because he didn’t think it was necessary, but he did put brighter bulbs in it.  He told her he could put track lighting in if that was what she wanted, or she says I could do it, and she’d give me the money for it.  Grist for the future mill.

In the meantime, I’ve also kept hacking away at The Pile, and have liberated the couch, and the table:

We knew when we shoved the couch in against that wall that thereafter you’d only be able to recline the left-hand side of it (as you can no longer reach the activation button for the right-hand side;  it’s trapped between the side of the couch and the wall.)  What we didn’t know was that the fit was so tight, the recliner would carve chunks out of the corner of the wall when you did it.  Fun!