In Which Some Loose Ends are Tied

Built Ins

In this post, I rebuilt the drawer portion of the built in closet, but didn't touch the upper cabinet or paint the new wood on the drawer. In the upper cabinet, there were three levels of side shelves that did not span the whole width of the cabinet. I'm not sure why they were built like that, but it isn't particularly helpful for storing linens. I could have put some kind of plastic drawer unit in the space to preserve the historical accuracy of the cabinet, but the idea of seeing an ugly drawer unit inside of a cabinet didn't appeal to me. Instead, I removed the half shelves and built some new full length shelves from plywood salvaged from the basement shelves I demo'd. I cut the lowest shelf full depth, but made the second tier 2/3 depth for ease of access; I left the top tier of half shelves since the top row is level with the top of the cabinet opening and access would be problematic with any kind of full width shelf.

I sanded and primed the shelves, built in rails, and the interior of the cabinet. I picked up a gallon of mistinted white from Lowes for $9 and used it for the plaster ceiling and walls of the cabinet. I used some trim paint that the previous owners left to repaint the rails and stiles of the built in drawers and well as the framing and floor of the cabinet. I did not repaint the doors, but that will be easy enough down the road.

Doesn't that look a lot nicer than the off-cream from before?

Baking Tray Clarification

I've gotten some questions about the baking tray drawer, so here is a picture of the drawer in use:

I never got around to adding dowels to the open side of the drawer, but I haven't had an issue with it yet. When it is more full, I may add the support to prevent the trays from tipping over and the drawer from getting stuck shut.

Garage Door Lock

Oh so long ago, we replaced the back door lockset with a digital keypad lock. I bought a second set to install on the garage entry door for keyless transit between the garage and and house, but because of the construction and fit of the garage door, it wasn't going to be a plug and play operation.
The first step was to try and plumb the door in the frame: every time we closed the door, we had to lift the handle to get the latches to engage because the top of the door leans away from the frame. I took a look at the hinges and found a mickey mouse grade mess: someone in the past apparently tried to plumb the door by stripping out the wood in the upper hinge screw holes and replacing the old screws in the lower hinge with 3" square drive screws and over-torquing them to high hell. Typically, the result from that work would result in a door that leans away from the top of the frame: hmmm, that sounds kind of familiar... To mitigate the out of plumb problem, someone decided to back out the screws in the lower hinge so the entire door could be manhandled shut. This is not how you're supposed to fix a door that doesn't hang right.
Ideally, I would just remove the old door and frame and install a new pre-hung exterior door. I may still do that, but at this point, all I want is a door that closes the way it should. I tried to remove the 3" screws from the bottom hinge so I could shim the hinge, but because of the over-torque on installation, I managed to both stall out my impact driver and strip out the square drive head on one of the screws. On a side note, square drive is stupid and rounds out too easily. Since I couldn't shim behind the lower hinge, I mickey-moused a shim by taping a piece of wood between the leaves of the hing: I'm not proud of it, but it works for now. I removed the old surface mount lock and drilled out a new lockset bore. The rest of the install went by the book, but because of the hinge issues, I know I will need to replace the door framing at some point to plumb up the door properly.