Over the last few months, I've been redoing the bathroom in my house. As with all renovation projects, it took longer than expected1, but I'm almost done now. All that remains is re-installing a pocket door.
If you have never had the pleasure of replacing a pocket door,2 you might think it doesn't sound like much. Let me disabuse you of this notion: it is, indeed, much.
When we bought the house, the door was missing one of its rollers and kind of just hung there, unused. Possibly, the entire bathroom renovation project was sparked into life by the annoyance of this door hanging crookedly from its track.
So, ready to put a bow on it, I took my newly re-painted pocket door to the opening and attempted to fit it in place. It did not fit.
The door used to fit. I took it out just a month ago. It's not like it had grown, but, for the life of me, I couldn't figure out why it wouldn't go past the frame. After a some powerful cogitation, I concluded that the new tile I laid must have raised the level of the floor and so the door was now too tall to fit in the opening.
The door was on my sawhorses and I was ready for the first incision when I (miraculously) had yet another realization: the door wasn't too big at all, I just needed to tilt the door so that the top could slide in place first. Pocket doors are taller than the door frame's dimensions, but this is because pocket doors are designed to hang from the track that is recessed into the frame above the doorway--once you get them in place, they have plenty of room to hang.
Even though this winding path to understanding took the better part of an afternoon, I patted myself on the back because this realization had been reached before I actually put blade to door (I'm kind of a cut twice or thrice, measure later guy).
So: haul the door back into the house, tilt it and apply moderate force (and pinch a finger) -- it fits. Great success!
Now, I just had to connect it to the rollers. The way the rollers work is that they have a screw that hangs down and this screw has a nut fixed in place halfway down the screw. Because the nut is fixed, you can raise or lower the screw by twisting it. The bottom of this screw has a flat head that fits into a slot on the top of the door. Hook the slotted head into the bracket on the top of the door and then twist the nut until it lifts the door off the floor and voila! Pocket door!
Not voila.
With the door in place, you don't have very much room to work the screw. I get that there's physics and all, but surely there is a better way to do this. There is almost no room to get a wrench or your fingers or even your youngest child's fingers in there to turn the screw.
Also, the brackets on the door have little plastic clips that are supposed to hold the screw in the bracket. These clips are pretty much exactly in the way of where you need to move your wrench. I managed about 1/32nd of a turn before bumping into the plastic clips and needing to reset.
I jabbed at it with this tiny little offset wrench that came in the package with the rollers for a while. If you've ever spent half an hour on a stool with your hands above your head trying to peer into a quarter-inch opening with sweat dripping into your eyes and three children asking you why the pocket door is "a son of a bitch," you will understand some of the emotions I experienced at this moment.
I became convinced that the wrench actually wasn't the right size to fit the screw.3 Clearly this couldn't be the case because occasionally I got it at the right angle and managed to turn the screw. But most of the time, it failed to line up with the edges of the nut and all I achieved was dinging up the paint job on the edge of the door.
I persevered. The pocket door eventually reached a point where it was floating in its slot. I stepped off my stool. I put down my offset wrench. I placed my hand on the door and gently pushed it into it's pocket: it began to slide. I pushed a little harder: it jammed.
Apparently, the wheels on the rollers I bought were a little too small for the track. They rolled fine when they didn't have any weight on them, but with the door hanging from them, they stuck. Unless you have the magic touch and manage to push the door exactly straight, it jams and requires loud yelling to make it move even just a little.
My youngest child got trapped in the bathroom today because he shut the door and it jammed when he tried to open it. Rescue Dad had a splitting maul in hand and was preparing to detach the door from its vigorous hold on life before my youngest achieved the magic touch and managed to push it back open.
Am I venting at this point? No. I am explaining why I will never again tolerate a house with a pocket door. I think I need to remove the door again, purchase new rollers (of the correct size) and repeat this process all over.
Footnotes
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The plan was just to re-paint, put in some new fixtures and a tile floor, but when I pulled up the vinyl, I discovered that the toilet drain had been leaking and had wrecked the subfloor beneath it, so I had to replace it. But of course, the nearest joists were beyond the wall behind the toilet, which meant I had to figure out how to reframe things around the toilet drain without being able to span between two joists--the answer turned out to be using lag screws to go up into the sill plate of the wall behind the toilet. I wished it stopped there, but it also turns out that the fine craftsmen who built this abode decided not to use any electrical boxes for the light fixtures, opting instead to tear holes in the drywall with the backs of their hammers or a crowbar or something and use the light fixture escutcheons to hide it all, and the water here is pretty hard so all the shut-off valves had corroded to the point where they weren't working anymore but because they were soldered I had to cut them off and the stubs weren't long enough to get new valves on without extensions. Don't get me started about the window in the shower stall... ↩
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This pocket door isn't anything fancy: just a door that hangs from two rollers that fit into a track along the top of the door frame. The bottom of the door floats a little above the floor as the door slides along the track into a slot inside the wall. ↩
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My kids really like Legos. Frequently, they will get stuck on a set and be convinced that they simply don't have the required piece. This is never the case, but it's so much more psychologically comfortable to believe that your difficulties are caused by manufacturer's error rather than your own confusion, they will easily believe they purchased the one set in which Lego failed to include a full set of the necessary pieces. You can't have righteous anger at yourself. ↩