The Door

 

   Doors can be tricky I've heard. Carpenters often buy doors already framed and trimmed and they just pop them into an opening and use shims to get everything square. A good carpenter is practiced at covering up his mistakes. That's why you see so much trim in the average house.

  Our cabin in the woods is ready for a door. We call the cabin the Cabinet because it's only 12' by 8', about two thirds the size of Thoreau's cabin. Thoreau built his cabin in the woods near Concord, Mass. and stayed there for two years in order to live deliberately. People are always building little hermitages away from it all for similar purposes. The poet Yeats built a cabin where peace comes dropping slow among the beans and the bees.

   I could certainly figure out how to hang the old door we had in the opening on the east side of the cabin. But it would take much trial and error and a return to the lumber yard after I cut things the wrong way. Our friend Joe Stenzel has hung doors before. He says it's fun and he offered to help. He was already helping since back in April when our boys Matt, Joe and Ned put up the cabin shell.

  So the shell is new and square but the windows and doors are old, picked up at auctions over forty years, stored in the garage where they became cracked and warped. But everything can be new again with TLC. The windows were popped into their openings and were then popped out in turn for reglazing and puttying. It's good there's no angry customer clamoring to move in. That would take the fun out of it.

   The sides of the cabin are covered in 1" x 6" rough boards. They are up and look good. The gaps between the boards are covered with  1.5" boards. The process is called board and batten siding and is common in Scandinavian buildings. The battens are mostly on. We had to rip the battens out of the 1" x 6" boards. We were thankful to have John Carsten's portable generator to power our table saw. Thoreau and Yeats never had such conveniences. 

  We took a break from installing the battens in order to get the door hung. Winter is coming after all. Putting up boards and battens is fairly mindless work. Hanging a door properly requires serious thinking. While Joe thinks, I stand by ready to hand him things. I aquired the various pieces of framing and casing at the lumber yard. I primed and painted them in the garage and carried them to the building site 347 steps away through the lush summer meadow and woods. 

   Joe measured then measured again before cutting the pieces to fit, because we had no spare pieces. Well, the lumber yards had spare pieces but that would be a pain. The door frame went up first and some wood was routed out of the frame to accommodate the hinges. A matching space was routed out of the edge of the door and the door was hung. A strike plate was installed on the opposite side to catch the latch and we looked upon our work and it was good.

   Next, the door casing went on for the door to close against and to stop the wind from getting in. The casing requires 45° cuts at the top corners and cutouts to match the threshold. This also requires much double and triple and quadruple checking. These simple looking jobs take an inordinate amount of time and I told Joe if we were doing this work every day we'd be much quicker but he only does once in every five or ten years. But it turned out brilliantly as proved by the satisfying "clunk!" the door made as it met the casing and latch.

Miles of work before I sleep here