Old & New (Cans & Doors)

Mon Dieu, but you people are ravenous for toilet pictures.

So here's a pic of the dismantled old, broken toilet. Note immense size of water tank:


Here is the new toilet, all installed and shiny.


Note the plaster wall behind the tank, where the old toilet used to be bolted to the wall. That plaster hole gives you an idea of the size difference between the two tanks, on top of the fact that the new tank is also lined with a thick coating of styrofoam. Less water, lest waste! (Oh yeah, and why is a silver coating bad? I have no idea.) I think I'll get on fixing the plaster next week.

My parents came to visit this week and while they were here the project of the week was to install a new front door. After the guys had ripped apart the door frame we discovered that our door is indeed the original one that was put on this house, 106 years ago. That's a long time to be a front door.

You can probably guess that in 106 years the door has become a bit inefficient and drafty. Okay, a LOT drafty. Also, it's hard to open and once you open it it's almost impossible to close, hence our desire to install a new front door. We bought a pre-hung one and like I said, the guys ripped apart all the framing so that the new door could be put in.


the mission was aborted after three or four hours, though. They discovered that the wall the door is in is a bit slanty and weird. Also, there is apparently some strange bevelling going on in the wood under the bottom plate of the door frame. Also, there is no framing in the door hole that a new pre-hung door could be attached to. The wall goes thusly: lathe, plaster, more plaster, hole. How does one attach a new door to nothing but 106-year-old plaster? The answer is, one does not. One calls a carpenter and asks them to make a frame in the slanty bevelly plaster wall.

So they put the framing back on around the door, but everything's all beat up now and it looks sad. The carpenter is going to come "when we get a nice day" so that could be... tomorrow? July 1st? Care to leave a guess?


Until then, this here funky little guy will still be our door key. One day, he will retire and become a decoration, kept around to remind us of the door that stood in our house for 106 years.