Fixing A Pocket Door: a house log

I have got one hand in my pocket door… and the other is prying off trim.

Okay, so I am no lyricist (I will leave that up to Alanis) but here is an example of our scrappy, learn-as-we-go, figure-this-out-if-it-kills-us approach to home improvement. We typically do not know what the heck we are doing, but diving in and giving things the ol’ college try is typically the road to success (and that way we get to gain experience as we go, so we might have a smidge of know-how the next time something needs work).

This is our half bath. It has a pocket door.

The pocket door has been jammed for, oh, about six months. So long that the phrase “Do not look, I am peeing” stopped sounding odd and gross. That is right, it became the normal courtesy warning around here when one of us was too lazy to walk across the house to the full bath (with a functional door to block the view). Yup, we do not pee in front of each other like nearly all of our married friends who think we are weird for being so shy. Gotta keep some mystery around here.

Anyway, we knew we had to remedy the door issue before moving in the next few weeks, but why we chose to start it one random Wednesday night at 8:30pm I will never know. But we did. Even though we did not have the first clue what needed to be done. Thank goodness for Google.

The all-knowing Internet gave us an assortment of potential attack plans. Many of them involved cutting large holes in the wall to diagnose the problem. Sigh. We truly hoped to avoid having to re-drywall anything. So we chose to start slower. Like perhaps-some-grease-will-do-the-trick slower:

The WD-40 helped, but mostly because it helped us better understand the issue. The wheels seemed to keep popping off of the track because the door was not hanging level anymore. It looked like it sat lower at the back, meaning when you slid it into the wall the bottom corner would catch on the floor, jamming the door and causing the wheels to jump the track.

We noticed there was an adjustable screw on the front set of wheels that could raise/lower that end of the door, helping with our it is-not-level issue. Only problem was that we had to pry off the trim on the top of the door to access it.

This is where the project began to go crazy and we got tunnel vision when it came to the task at hand (thereby forgetting to take good photos or make any attempt at containing our mess).

We ended up having to take off the side trim too. Simply so we could remove the door entirely from the track so that I could walk it out to the garage (in a rainstorm) and saw off about an inch of door on the bottom. Apologies to our neighbors for using a circular saw at 10pm (hopefully the rain and the closed garage door drowned me out).

With the slightly shorter door back inside, we popped it back on the track and… voila! No more sticking. No more jamming into the floor. No more falling off the track. Now we simply had to reinstall the trim, caulk some nail holes, and touch up some paint. Our reaction was as follows: did we truly simply fix it? Without even waking the baby?

Well, I’d say it is 95% better than it was. If you get all Arnold Scwartzeneger on it and push or pull it too hard/swiftly it still jumps off of the track. BUT, now that the door is shorter it is a zero-tool, three-second fix to lift it up slightly and place it back on track. No trim removal necessary. And the baby did not wake up once during deconstruction or reconstruction (even though we were prying and hammering our hearts out). Why did not we discover that she’d sleep through noise like that sooner? Either way, good to know.

It is so pleasant to have the ol’ pocket door back in business after months of broken-ness (so we can now close the door instead of screaming the ol’ “Do not look, I am peeing!” refrain across the house).

And that, my friends, is no small victory.

So that is truly how we problem solve around here. Googling, trial and error, and crossed fingers. Here is another post about gaining Hands-on confidence with zero experience as you go. Have you folks had success with the same fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants method? Any other pocket door issues or coups going on? Any other couples who do not pee in front of each other, or are we the only ones?