- Dec 31, 2018
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- 28,141
A couple of years ago I was at the in-laws house and my MIL asked me to look at a pocket door that was stuck open and wouldn't budge. As my FIL is fairly handy, I figured it was going to be something pretty serious.I’ll call this post: you coksucker motherfuker
Looks like a ton of rain this evening so I decided to do an indoor chore instead of applying more stain to the pergola. My daughter’s pocket door has been sticking and damn near impossible to open. So I decided to tackle that.
I love pocket doors and I have installed pocket doors so I know their internals. Based on the behavior of this one, I am thinking the back rollers have somehow come off the track. There is only one way to fix this and I have to cut a hole in the wall for access.
So I make a roughly 6inch by 12 inch hole by the door header where the rear roller should be. I find no issues. Hmmm, maybe the track is somehow bent. So I cut a hole the entire length of the track. Everything is sliding fine.
After opening and closing a few dozen times, I find the problem. The hanging door is not level which is causing some friction. Super easy fix as the rollers have a tiny nut to turn to adjust the height to level. Which I now have easy access to. Make some turns on the nut and it now slides in and out perfectly. I think to myself: I can make one last quarter turn and the door would go from almost perfectly level to perfectly level.
What I should know by now: going back in for a tiny adjustment is usually a bad idea.
I stink my little wrench up there, it slips out of my hand. It falls behind the drywall between the pocket door. Which is maybe a 1 inch gap. I can only stand there in disbelief as I hear it rattling down the inside of wall like the fuking plinko game.
There is about an 1/8 inch crack between the door and the jamb that I can sorta see in there. The wrench has wedged itself in some of the door framing about halfway to the floor. I am so screwed.
I have lots of magnets, maybe I can get it with one of those. Nope. My real fear now is I will knock it loose and it fall even farther. There is only one solution: cut a bigger hole into the wall so I can reach down there and grab it. Which I did. And recovered the wrench.
The problem is the extra hole turned the easy drywall fix into a nightmare drywall fix. But I’ll get it done one day.
At least the door is sliding perfectly now.
This one put me in a bad mood.
I take a look at it and sure enough, it won't budge. Shining a flashlight through the gap between the door and the trim, I can't see anything wrong with the track and can't see any obstructions, but when I try to close it nothing. I don't know made me try this, but I eventually tried closing it by pulling on the actual door at the top a couple of inches from the track. This leads me to discover that whatever is holding the door back is at the bottom, not the top. Turns out my MIL had recently had new base boards put in in the room parallel to the door and the brilliant installers had used finishing nails which were long enough to go through the moulding and the pocket door frame into the actual door, basically nailing it open. Using a metal yard stick it was a simple thing to bend the nails and allow the door to slide as designed. Took much longer to figure out the problem than to fix it! As a bonus, my MIL, for a couple of minutes anyway, thought I was brilliant.