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In addition to the kitchen, we've also managed to finish putting up the garage door openers, so we now have two fully functional and automatic garage doors. Now let me tell you all about the debacle of putting these damn things up...
Remember how I was complaining about the fact that if there was supposed to be a part required for assembly, that it should in fact be included with the hardware in the box? Yeah, well it seems that the parts I needed WERE indeed included, and I was just to dumb to notice. So, after two weeks of trying to procure the correct screws (which I thought I was missing) in order to attach the chain spreader, without much luck mind you, I finally got fed up and decided to call the company for guidance. As I was waiting on hold, I figured I'd go through the boxes and bags of hardware that came with the opener. When I grabbed the bag that the chain spreader had come in, what to my wondering eyes did appear, BUT THE TWO FREAKING SCREWS THAT I WAS LOOKING FOR OVER A WEEK AND A HALF FOR! They were in the corner of the bag, sealed off from the rest of it. I hung up the phone immediately (and not before uttering some not very kind, yet extraordinarily colorful words to myself for actually being so stupid) and got down to the business of completing the assembly of the first opener. Suffice to say, things went very quickly after that. My brother and I set about building the support structure for the header that would be where the front of the track would mount. After several hours, what seemed like hundreds of nails, countless cuts of wood, and more than a couple of hammer smashed fingers with accompanying colorful language, the structure was built and in place. Quite the milestone! Except, it was too tall...we had to tear the whole thing down, and start over. We finally managed to get it to the correct height (using more swearing and nails) and test it out. Lo and behold, the thing actually worked! I was stoked! It looked like two blind and drunk monkeys had completed the operation, but who cares!
The second one went much more smoothly. My friend John came down to help me out with it, and since he's an engineer, I figured I would put that skill to good use in building a better anchor point for the header on this one, while I assembled the opener. He did an excellent job, but we still ran into a minor problem. This time, the anchoring point was too low. The garage door was not clearing the track. We had to tear that whole thing apart and rebuild two or three inches higher, which actually went much smoother still than the first one. Eventually, we got it up and the door did clear the track. Over the past couple of days, I went about running the wiring for the safety systems (IR beams that stop the door closing if the beam is broken by someone walking through the door). Again, this looks like complete amateur work, but it works, so who cares? I'm just excited to have two fully functional openers now!
In other projects, when we pulled up the carpet in the breezeway, we noticed that in the little "hallway" between the kitchen and the family room, the floor was not what you would call *level* - there was about a 1/2 inch difference in height between the kitchen and family room, which presented a problem for laying the tile in that area. We decided to try self leveling underlayment in order to even it out. That was our project for last night. I had built a sort of cage to contain the self leveler out of some old MDF that we had to pull up in the family room due to mold. There were a few containment failures, but nothing that appeared really major. It seems like it is working, but I'll have to see when I go back over today.
That's about it for now. We still have a couple of major projects left to complete (tiling, hardwoods, upstairs bathroom - which I'm picking up the building permit for today), but things are coming along nicely. More pictures to come as projects are completed!
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