Condo Blues: February 2008

Monday, February 4, 2008

If I Had a Hammer, I Would Bodge the World

Now that I own a condominium, I realize more and more that homeownership is a mixed bag of:
  • The good - finally I can live in a place where the walls can be something other than Ugly Renter Beige.
  • The not so good - if something breaks, I have to fix it, or it stays broken forever.
This leads me to today’s favorite tool: the rubber mallet. With a rubber mallet, you can fix pretty much anything in a quick and careless manner*. Well, almost anything. A rubber mallet is not the tool to use when you are trying to break into your own house.

But that's a story for a different day.

Anyhoo, today I pressed the button on the garage door opener. The door made its usual, "Wrrrr, wrrr" noise as it moved down, down and stopped when it hit the driveway with a strange, "ka-chunk!" Whereby the garage door decided it didn't want to stay in its down, upright, and locked position and moved in an upward fashion. Weird.

Because I can be rather thick, I play push-the button-and-hope-the-door-closes about three or four more times before giving up and actually walking into the garage to investigate why the door wouldn’t close. Turns out one of the wheels on the side of the garage door jumped the door track. A couple of whacks with my trusty rubber mallet were all it took to quickly reset the wheel into the garage door track and allow the garage door to close properly. Easy peasy.

I love my rubber mallet.

* AKA "bodging" (for those of you who weren't into Scrapheap Challengeor >Junkyard Wars back in the day.)

Did you enjoy this post? Get more like it by subscribing to the Condo Blues RSS Feed or to Condo Blues by Email.