Not the best start to the day!
Even worse than getting wet on the way to work! After I got a towel out of the linen room this morning I made sure the door shut behind me. Normally this would be the sensible thing to do but not today: the bin which sometimes catches the door open fell over and fitted really snugly into the gap between the door and the chimney breast behind it!
I could only move the door about half an inch at the top and almost nothing at the bottom. The windows were properly fastened so I couldn’t get in that way, I tried to push the door but nothing doing. The next trick was to prise the top of the door open and hold it there with a screwdriver while fishing around the edge with an unravelled coat hanger. As this is one of those bins that is just a lid on a stand it was rally hard to catch hold of anything, especially as I was having to fish around the corner.
I decided I would have to leave it until after breakfast - you can’t go around being noisy at 8 o’clock in the morning. The door is a panel door so in my naivety I thought I could pop off the architrave and then pop the panel out. Once I’d removed all the trim I realised what I had in front of me was the main sheet of the door with all the other decorative bits fixed on to it. Not to be defeated by this I resorted to even more desparate measures, I found Ginty’s drill and a pointed saw and drilled a square of holes in this bottom panel and then sawed through (like a reverse join the dots) until the square dropped out and I could fish through with my crowbar to move the bin!
All in all this last part of the job only took about 20 minutes and that included cutting some squares of plasterboard to cover up my damage. I think Tony and Ginty will need to do something better with this one day when they have a bit more time to make it all look a bit prettier but at least housekeeping could get to their linen and the door is once again fireproof!
I’ll be more careful next time.
