Finally, inspiration for Nanowrimo

Good is almost worse than bad

Man, I hate Quality Control.

I have two documents to review today. One is Spanish to English and is fairly simple. There aren't any errors in accuracy, and only a handful of grammatical and format mistakes. The work appears to be done by a competent translator.

The other more technical document is English to Spanish, and is done by an educated Spanish speaker who is an excellent translator. It includes very few accuracy errors.

But for some reason, the errors really get on my nerves in both cases. The first translator didn't insert hard page breaks, so there are lines that jump up to the bottom of the previous page. That wrinkles my rankle.

The second translated "specimens" as especímenes, which is not technically wrong, but the normal term is muestras. Likewise, all videos are referred to as cintas de video, video tapes, in spite of the fact that they are recorded on a DVD! Computer files are referred to as ficheros and expedientes, instead of the more common archivos. Come on, at least be consistent!

Arrrgh.

Don't eat the wobbly green bit

 For some time, I have been hearing noises between the first and second floors of my house and in the attic over my bedroom. There are rat droppings in the garage, and I found an old plastic container of ferret vitamins gnawed to tiny slivers. A few weeks ago, I set glue traps in the garage by the washing machine where there's a section of wallboard missing.

A few days after I set the glue traps, one of them disappeared. I went to a store and looked for regular rat traps, but only found mouse traps. I bought a couple and set them in the area. When I checked shortly thereafter, they were sprung but empty.

Finally I climbed into the attic, which is two floors above the garage. There, near the chase that brings the a/c ducts from the furnace into the attic, was the glue trap. A section of glue was missing.

I stopped at Home Depot and bought two rat traps. I set one in the attic, baited with crunchy peanut butter. A few days later, I found a rat in it. The rat had a chunk of peanut clenched between its teeth.

My current home improvement project is to add a shower to my upstairs bathtub. One of the newly soldered pipe joints began to leak last week. While I was trying to solve that problem, I checked the laundry area (in the garage just below that bathroom) to see how much water had run down the wall. There was a trickle of water under the dryer. I pulled it out of the corner and discovered a decomposing rat carcass. Apparently it was the one that sprang the mousetraps, and one of the traps had killed it without trapping it.

During that time, I was also hearing very loud gnawing sounds from the attic. I set another rat trap (smooth peanut butter this time) and checked it every couple of days. Then the kids and I went to Birmingham for my niece's wedding. When I came back, I found a huge and somewhat redolent rat in the trap, his teeth coated with peanut butter.

Last night as I sat in my family room, I heard loud gnawing in the area underneath my upstairs bathroom, under the shower. I thumped on the ceiling, afraid that the rat would gnaw through the plumbing or something equally destructive. The gnawing noise ceased, but rustling continued.

This afternoon I'll stop on the way home and buy more rat traps for the garage and the attic. I think I'll go with crunchy peanut butter again. Once the garage rat is dead, I'll seal the wall behind the dryer. I think I'll also see whether I can close up the a/c chase.

Another handyman post

I spent Saturday at my friend Robin's, changing out the door between her house and the garage. Poor Robin; her house is built on the infamous black gumbo that underlies much of Grand Prairie and Arlington, and it bucks and jumps all over the place as the weather changes and the earth shifts. Olshan Engineering worked on it several times, but finally gave up. Right now the hallway walls lean a good inch to the west.

The door I tore out was a hollow plywood door, not the fire-rated door required by code for garage or exterior access. The opening was a good two inches larger than the door frame, which turned out to be a good thing, given how horribly out of plumb her house is. Whoever hung the old door used only three little triangles of wood as shims, two on the hinge side and one near the lock, so the frame had shifted around a fair amount in the opening. There was no insulation in all the empty space around the frame. A few years ago, I changed the threshold under the door, but the recent shifting of the house had left a gap between them.

Robin had bought a simple steel entry door at HD. I don't remember the brand, but it isn't Stanley, it's something made locally in Garland. It came prehung and with a steel threshold. HD describes it as "Basic Series Steel" on their website.

I cut six scraps of 1x4 to use as shims in the four corners and by the middle hinge and the doorknob. (I should have used two full-length 1x4s top to bottom, but all I had was one 6' piece.) I screwed them to the 2x4s before I stood the door between them. Fortunately, the floor in the door opening is very nearly plumb. I caulked the underside of the threshold before I set the door in place, to seal it to the floor. The opening, however, leans to the west, so the bottom hinge-side shim touched the door frame, as did the top doorknob-side shim. The other two corners had about a 1/2" gap. I used my finish nail gun to secure the door in place after it was plumbed up, and then used wedge-shaped shims at each of  my six contact points to fill the gaps so I could screw the frame to the opening without skewing it. (I've seen carpenters actually use only finish nails to hang a door, without screws or even shims. Usually within a year or two, doors hung that way will develop problems.)

This drawing shows more or less what I have described. The black rectangles are the 1x4 shims, and the red ones are wedge shims where I installed screws. The door comes with four long screws to install through the three hinges to attach the hinge side of the frame to the opening. I used 3" sheetrock screw on the doorknob side.

I learn something new every time I hang a door. Those instruction papers can be right informative. This time I found out that I could hide the screws by putting them behind the weatherstripping. Who'd a thunk it? Why didn't the other doors' instructions mention that? Or did I never read that far before?

Once the door frame was securely fastened in the opening, and I had verified that the space between the door and frame was fairly even all around and that it opened and closed without rubbing, I installed the doorknob and the strike plate. The hardware had square corners and the cutouts on the new door had rounded corners, so it required very minor surgery with a utility knife to make the hardware fit.

I nailed up the trim on the inside first. Since the door opening is so big, the trim barely covered the gap. I had to shoot most of the nails at an angle to grab anything behind the trim. Wider trim would have been nice, but Robin didn't have any, and in any case I think she wants all the door trim in that hallway to match.

I stuffed insulation into the gaps and caulked the places that were too tight for insulation before I added the garage-side trim. Then I caulked all the seams and the finish nail holes. Done, and weather-tight, until the next time the house shifts and the door gets pushed out of square...

Be Comfortable. Buy Good Pants. 95% of Men Agree Bonobos Fit Better

The title text was in an ad in the left margin of my Xanga front page. I found it amusing.