I don’t know why my husband and I think we can fix this shit. Its like asking Lucy and Ethel to do home improvement. It can only end badly.

All I wanted was a simple screen door on the back door. That’s it, not something complicated like a storm door. We wouldn’t even need help to install it. Just a cheap’o wood screen door. Yeah right!

First, putting up this screen door would have been easy if our house wasn’t slanty. And really, we should have known better from the get go than to expect something to work right. A regular door and the corresponding threshold is in the shape of a rectangle. Ours, however, is in the shape of a rhombus. A damned RHOMBUS! So my husband and I spent the weekend sanding and painting this stupid door. Only to find out when its all done that it doesn’t fit. So, AFTER its all painted, my husband starts sanding down the sides to make it fit. As you can see, this ruined our paint job.

You can also see how the constant shaving caused some of the lines in the door to be uneven. I think this is due more to the tool my husband used (which looked more like a cheese grater than the tools I’ve seen on New Yankee Workshop). It’s especially noticeable at the corners.

Second, We decided it probably wasn’t a good idea to paint through the screen for the cross bars on the back side. Yeah….look how that turned out.

This looks absolutely ridiculous but it’s up now which makes painting it and correcting the mistake that much more difficult.

Third, as we were peeling the painter’s tape from the screens, we ran into a slight problem. We’d thought enough ahead to keep the screen from getting gunked with paint. That, at least, we’d done right. However, upon peeling the tape back, it wasn’t coming off clean. I’ve come to the realization that painter’s tape is stupid and doesn’t really work correctly. I’ve never had it work as it’s intended and not destroy the lines on the wall. NEVER!

At some point, I get the great idea to get the box cutters to cut the tape and paint apart. Honestly, I don’t know why he even lets me near home improvement project. This turned out to be a bad idea about 15 seconds in. If you look closely enough on the left hand side of the middle section, you can see the cellophane tape I used to hold together the hole I sliced through the screen.

Seriously! It’s like a sitcom. This took us three days. THREE DAYS to fuck up! Next is the side yard and some landscaping. If I could keep anything alive this wouldn’t be so bad but I’ve already killed my share of plants.