One Measly Inch

The question is simple enough: How do you get an object into your house, if it is too large to get it through the front or back door? As documented in this very space, not 48 hours ago, I am in the process of restoring my downstairs bathroom, a legendary endeavor of biblical proportions.

It’s like the bible because it’ll be a miracle if I can actually pull this off.

Silly me… I had intended that the interior framing for the new-to-us shower stall unit, be completed by now, the blueprint long since taking up space in the quagmire that comprises my mind. Shockingly, I encountered technical difficulties.

My unit was too big to get it in.

[Editor's Note: Really?]

The dimensions of the shower unit are 36 inches wide, by 36 inches long, by 72 inches tall, exactly one inch too big to get through a 35-inch front door. One measly inch but it may as well have been a mile. A quick check of the back door revealed a 32-inch door. I was going backwards, a not unfamiliar strategy of mine.

As matters stood, if I were interested in bringing the unit through the front door, I would have had to take apart the front door casing. This is the one-by, wooden frame, that houses the door, and it would have given me 5/8 inches, doubled, plus the amount of space the shims for aligning the door had taken up. I would have gained maybe an additional inch-and-a-half, so one-half inch wider than we needed.

Plenty enough for the girl I go with.

However, having put that door frame in place, in June of 1982, I knew this would be no cakewalk. My tendency to overbuild in the early years, is renowned, a reputation I have collided face-first with, these past couple of weeks. If two nails were good, then three were better.

In the case of the door, whether proper form or not, I would never install one now with nails-only screws, for easy removal-I know you get it. Back in the day, I used ten-penny galvanized nails on the front door casing, more than my limited math skills would allow me to count. As a result, removing the casing would require that I do serious damage to the wood, in order to extract those nails.

It’s fun stuff, all of that beating on the cat’s paw with a hammer. Metal on metal. Manly stuff. My right thumb will recover, of course, from the other day, though the cool pattern from the face of the framing hammer, has now started to recede from the thumb itself, so it’s losing some of its glamor. Recovery comes at a cost.

[Editor’s Note: Psssst]

Got it. I bailed out on destroying and then having to rebuild the the front door casing, and went on a voyage of discovery around the first floor of my house. I had already decided that trying to get the unit up to a second story entry point, was out of the question, praise be.

I do have a six-oh-four-oh in my lower dining room bay window, shop talk for a window six-feet-wide, by four-feet-tall, but though half of six feet is 36 inches, the actual opening was only thirty-four-and-a-half, so no go. No other window, not even the sliding glass door from our bedroom bay window, was anywhere near big enough.

Dang. I googled shower units and found that of course, there were plenty smaller than 36 inches. The question was, how long would it take to order it, and what was I supposed to do with the unit already scheduled for installation?

It was back to the drawing board, a dismal prospect when it comes to that aforementioned quagmire of my mind, but somewhere along the path, I found a brand new marker. You, my dedicated and avid readers, could not have been expected to come up with the solution, because you could not have been aware that the third item on my materials list, was a (shop-talk coming) four-oh, three-oh window.

"Now, Mr.Thumb, do you see the tool that
assaulted you anywhere in the lineup? Please,
look carefully.Take your time."

Indeed, I was removing two small windows from the laundry room (half of the bathroom project involves the adjacent laundry room), and replacing them with one bigger window. And if you are astute as I know you are, you have already deduced that in creating the opening for a window that is four feet wide, by three feet tall, the opening has to be a tad bigger than 48 inches by 36 inches, thereby providing the entry point needed to get the shower unit in. 

Those two little windows I took out, were the same two that I originally removed from the pool room wall, when I built the addition in 2010. I had inserted them into the laundry room to replace a larger window that was single-paned, but the little screens were long since destroyed. Musical windows and all of that.

Oh, and by the way, when I installed those windows in 2010, I used an impact driver and screws, so it took me about a half-hour to create the opening I needed to get the shower unit into the house. As BossLady says, you have to take advantage of those cool “signposts of life,” that indicate you are on the right highway, or in this case, dirt road.