the cult hangs a door

this may be one of those stories where you had to be there to get how funny it was, but i'm telling it anyway.

the finished product:

not bad, huh?

the reason for this entire project is because we're currently renting a house in garland, texas while living in abu dhabi. the pets have to have a place to live, right? and a way to let themselves out of their abode so they can poop in the yard.

so - hanging doors - we've done this kind of thing before (well, jeff did anyway). we don't want to cut a giant hole for a dog door in our landlord's doors, so we purchase new doors, cut those and hang them. then when we move out, we just rehang the original doors. simple, but not so much if you're a home depot sub-contractor. said sub-contractor, whose name was 'cotton' (what the hell?) came over to the house to assess the situation and said he'd tear out both doors and their frames and then install new ones. i tried to explain to him that when we eventually move out of the house, we wouldn't be able to put the original doors back if the frames were different. he didn't care and didn't want to do the job i requested; he wanted to do what he wanted to do.

after ranting on the phone to heidi about the @ssholes at home depot, richard (heidi's lovely husband) says he'll help me hang the doors. both doorways measured, trip to home depot ensues. no solid core doors; one hollow core door purchased to see if it fits one of the door frames. when you buy a door by the way, its just a flat slab of wood - no hinges, no door knob, no nothing. we also bought two dog doors (which are 3 times the price of a regular door) and this cool little tool that is supposed to help drill door knob and hinge holes (but still requires a construction degree).

after getting door and acoutrement home we discover that new door is too long and too wide. side-trip to bill's house to borrow saws of all kinds. proceed to make the door smaller by sawing the sh*t out of it. now, even though richard is an architectural engineering-type guru and an executive at a commercial design firm and heidi has probably changed many tires in her life (i've done nothing of the sort), i don't believe any of us have ever used a skil-saw or circular saw or ANY kind of saw. its a wonder none of us lost a finger, although we did manage to lose about 5 hinge screws and tristan's respect as apprentice handymen (tristan is heidi and richard's very patient offspring).

midway through sawing the new door (which took approximately two hours), and after bitching at jeff on the phone, it is decided it would be way too much trouble to hang two doors (another trip to home depot would have been a beating). we ended up sawing a giant hole in one of the landlord's door anyway. at which time she actually dropped by the house to check on how the move-in was going (good! thanks!). i politely blocked her from entering the house as she tried desperately to get a look at the cause of the loud construction noises coming from the garage.

7 smoke breaks, 4 beer breaks, many, many laughs and 7 1/2 hours later, we completed the hanging of 1 door (with new dog door intact) and the install of a 2nd dog door. the pets unfortunately, have not shown any appreciation of our extremely hard work.

ok, so that story was not near as funny as it was while we were living it. i don't care; it had to be told. heidi, richard and i are thinking that was just practice and we should start our own company hanging doors - we'd call it 'cult construction'.

all is well here in abu dhabi. been partying with jefferson's boss (nick) and co-worker (jorge). shopping still takes a major part of my day since i'm trying to walk to every mall or hypermart available. got spit on last week (that was totally uncalled for). and still get yelled at randomly. spent another night in dubai (dubai kicks abu dhabi's @ss).

more pics later.

miss everyone.

t.