Problem Solving 901

Don't you know how to walk a door?

In the winter, we shut the two sets of sliding doors on the pole barn to tame the wind and keep snow drifts out. The doors are a bit…rickety. They are comprised of metal sheeting tacked onto poorly built wooden frames and hung on rollers that are approximately 12 feet above the ground. The metal is mangled, the wood is rotting, and the nailed butt joints are laughable.

Last winter, a storm pulled one end of the jumbo east door off the roller hinge, and it has been pathetically slanted off its track ever since. Shortly after it fell, I tried to move it back in to position and quickly knew it was not a one person job. The door is probably a few hundred awkwardly-shaped pounds. Since then, I’ve been casually waiting for a remedy to emerge.

The remedy showed up this weekend in the form of my 82-year old father. It is necessary to have a hefty project list at the ready during these visits to keep him busy. Tractor work is always a hit, followed by fruit tree critique and management. But the #1 most irresistible project is one that requires climbing a ladder or a tree (following dubious safety protocols). His growing complaints about aging, loss of energy, and loss of strength have absolutely no influence on his ladder climbing decisions or ambitions.

After inspecting the attachment point that connects the door to the roller system, he proclaimed that we needed to move the door about 8 feet to the right from its current spot so that we could reattach the pin to the roller and then move the door back to the left to seat the roller into the track. Sure.

His first question: “Don’t you have a come-along?” Come again? No, I do not have a come-along, which is apparently a type of winch that is handy for moving giant doors and other heavy objects. He went to work finding alternative gadgets we could use, and by the time I returned from the basement with some C-clamps he requested, he’d moved on to a broken tool handle and a tow chain.

We were able to loop the chain below the fallen door corner and the handle, together lifting the door out of the dirt and onto a cement block. After a few missteps with the upper part of the door getting wedged on the wrong side of the opening (resolved by more trips up the ladder to jam boards strategically), we were ready to start walking the door right. This kind of walking is less about moving your legs and more about knowing how to use a 2x4 and a cement block as a lever and a fulcrum. Which I only know because I tried literal walking first and was promptly questioned: “Don’t you know how to walk a door?”

It’s getting more precious to bear witness to my dad’s problem solving prowess. He has such an immense library of techniques and ability to imagine improvised tactics based on the available tools. It reminds of the false dichotomy of “strategy versus tactics” or “thinking versus doing” that pervades the knowledge economy I spend most of my days in. Everyone wants to be a strategist, which seems to imply they will spend little to no time learning and practicing technique. But, you won’t get very far if you don’t even know how to walk a door.