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substitute strike plate
Wednesday, March 3 2021
At the end of the workday today, I went on another landlording outing to the Brewster Street house. On the way, I stopped at the Kington Plaza to get some supplies at Hannaford (store-brand black tea, energy drinks, non-Goya canned beans, tempeh, a box of large zip-lock sandwich bags (for containerizaton of laptop power supplies), and six two-quart rectangular plastic food containers (for crap organization in the laboratory). I also got some long wood screws and Krazy Glue at Herzog's. The problem at Brewster Street was that the the screws securing the hinges of bathroom door had managed to work their way out of the door jam, and that was why I'd bought the long wood screws. Sure, the holes the old screws had gone into were all stripped out, but those screws (and there were only two of them, one in each hinge) were fairly thin. My new screws easily found solid wood to anchor in, and I put in six of them, three in each of the two hinges. Now the door could swing freely, but it resisted a little as the door was closed, suggesting that the orientation of the hinges was skewed out from the the plane of the wall. This wouldn't've been a problem had the door been able to latch in the door jam, but that part was all chewed away and there was no strike plate. So I went out to the Subaru to see what might work as a substitute strike plate. I found a copper pipe hanger, a little U-shaped piece of sheet metal with two ears for screws, designed to support a copper pipe running along a wall or ceiling. By bending it into a flat strip, I could screw it into the door frame to serve as a strike plate. Then, for the first time in years, the bathroom door could be closed.
While I was at Brewster Street, I also looked at the latching mechanism for a door between the kitchen and the back porch. It was one of those antique designs, the kind with a narrow square-cross-section spindle, and one of the knobs had been lost, so there wasn't much I could do besides take pictures. Meanwhile the tenant was talkng to a visiting friend who was talking about how terrible it was to have had Covid-19. I had a tickle in my throat after that, but it was psychosomatic (or a side-effect of the energy drink and 150 milligrams of pseudoephedrine I'd taken this morning).
We had another springlike day today, with sunny skies and temperatures reaching nearly to 50 degrees Fahrenheit. This evening when I went outside to piss in the snow and get some more firewood from the woodshed, I found Diane the Cat enjoying the relatively balmy weather. There was still plenty of old snow around the house, but in all the places I'd shoveled snow from, the paths were clear and dry.
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