I promise, I had a plan...

About a year ago, my sister Kami and her husband replaced their front door. When they did this, they gifted me with their old screen door. I have enjoyed having this door, and have been planning since receiving it to fix it up and replace the hard golden plastic inserts with screening to allow for air flow. Especially when one side of them broke a lot and the lack of symmetry has pestered me. So, Saturday morning, bright and early, I started my attack. First things first, I had to remove the aforementioned hard plastic. Here is the pre-starting picture of the door and you can see on the right where the plastic is missing.

I learned the hard way that the plastic in there is very sharp when it's broken. It took me only about 30 minutes to pull it all out, but oh did it end up being a painful half an hour. Here is a picture of some of the larger chunks. If you really want to look closely, you can see some blood drops from the second of the injuries I sustained. Just as an FYI that's as gory as this post gets. I didn't take pictures of the actual injuries because I was to busy bleeding and cursing.

After all the fun of tearing the door apart and waiting an hour for my injuries to stop bleeding through bandaids, I began to attempt to screen the inserts. Holy crap was this frustrating. After 2 1/2 hours of trying every way I could think of, I threw in the towel. The rugrat and I jumped on in the car and headed to Lowe's. I have a guy coming to measure this week and I should have the new door installed and the old one hauled away by mid next week. In the interim, this is the view from inside. The upside is that it gives me fantastic air flow, but the cotton and blossoms blowing in mean I have to vacuum more often.

I also learned something after injuring myself. I managed to cut the pads of my left thumb and pointer finger. The pointer finger is the one that dropped blood all over as it was more of a deep stab than a cut. Anyway, what I learned is that I don't open anything right-handed. I do most things with both hands, but there are a few things that I do with one specific hand. Apparently opening anything in a wrapper or a jar or a bottle, I only do with my left hand. Unfortunately I would forget this every time, so whenever I opened something, I ended up having to change the bandaids because I'd start bleeding all over again. My poor fingers!

So, I learned three things.

1. I should never try to screen anything ever again. I do not have the patience to do it. Nor do I have the ability to do much of anything without injuring myself.

2. I learned that I open things solely with my left hand. Because of this, I should be more careful when I decide to try something that I don't have patience for.

3. I also learned that if I try really hard, I can just curse in my head instead of out loud. Yay for the rugrat because I'm pretty sure her ears would have burned right off.

Thus ends my adventure in screening. I hope to remember to post pictures of my new door when it's in.