Doors closing flush at the Women Build site hinges on my ability to screw in hinges correctly.
Ha. I thought that was funny.
On my third Saturday of work out at the Habitat for Humanity Women Build, I was a jack of all trades.
I began the morning sanding down door molding so other women could come behind me and touch up paint. The job was done quickly and then I was looking for something else to do.
Reggie, the assistant to the top guy on site, then assigned me and another woman to door hinges in a back room of the house. We were to use a tapered tool and scrape down the inset area on the face of the door where a hinge sits. The hinge won't screw in flush and a door won't close flush if dried paint is caked in the inset. Essentially, our job was to off scrape dried paint. When that was done, we screwed on the hinges.
A little bit of trivia for you - door hinges are identified as male and female for the number of door pin holes they have. Male hinges have two; female hinges have three.
The other woman I was working with, Susan, and I agreed it had to have been a male inventor or contractor who thought up the male/female thing.
Male hinges are screwed in to doors while female hinges are screwed in to door moldings.
So, I tackled the paint scraping job and spent the majority of my day doing that. This detail had never occurred to me. But once I began the work, it made perfect sense. Without removing the dried paint from the hinge insets, the actual hinge sat at an awkward angle or did not fit inside the inset at all.
It's the little details that pay off. I understand that now.
By lunchtime, all hinge insets had been scraped so Reggie and I moved on to installing a metal rack in the laundry room. The factory rack had to be cut down so he and I measured it and marked where I would cut ... with a hacksaw. That's right, a hacksaw. With all the wonderful construction technology these days, I wondered why there wasn't a saw that could cut through the rack in a matter of seconds. Maybe there is and it just wasn't available Saturday.
Whatever the case, I spent a good 10 minutes laboring over the hacksaw as it painstakingly made progress through the solid metal rungs. My right arm will no doubt be sore tomorrow.
It was finally cut to size and Reggie and I measured and marked the wall for where the rack's supports would go. And that's when the highlight of my day came - I got to use the power drill. It was awesome. I drilled holes through the sheet rock then pushed in plastic supports the rack would snap into.
The power drill is the tool to have. I would buy one tomorrow except it would sit somewhere collecting dust ... other than the times I would turn it on just so I could.
March 15 is my last work day at the Women Build house and I'm told March 30 is the dedication. Keep checking the Aiken Standard for updates.
