One of Those Days

Good grief!

It was supposed to be a simple door install. I was simply replacing an interior door that a dog destroyed. The customer had the replacement door on hand. All I had to do was line up to two doors and transfer the hinge and handle locations. Next, I would simply chisel out the hinge settings, attached the hinges then rehang the door before drilling out the handle hole. However, after chiseling out the hinge settings, things didn't go so well.

After I reattached the hinges, I went to hang the door. When I did, I discovered that the new door was just a little wider than previous door. Because of this, the door wouldn't close. To make the door fit I needed to shave off 1/8 of an inch. While I have a lot of tools at my disposal, I really don't have a good way of shaving a door down. My only real option was to use my skil saw. To do this, I would simply place a straight edge at the right location and run my skil saw next to it so that it would shave off the right amount. This works well if you have a good solid straight edge, the only problem was that mine wasn't a good solid straight edge. Because of this, as I ran my saw against it, it flexed. This flex allowed my saw to go way off course causing me to effectively ruin the door.

Fortunately, it was only a $28 door. Also, it was fortunate that Lowes was just a couple blocks away. The whole project should have only taken two hours, however, after two hours, I was basically starting all over.

I was much more careful shaving the door the second time. However, I was to conservative in my cutting and didn't cut off enough. Because of this, the door was still too tight. However, it wasn't tight enough to justify using the table saw again. I thought I could fix the problem by setting the hinges a little deeper and by using my grinder/sander to shave off the little extra necessary. Finally, after MANY trips of taking the door in and out to try it out, it eventually fit, but not until another 3 and 1/2 hours had passed.

So, today I was paid $70 (I estimated it as a 2 hour job). Take away $31 for the door (including tax) and I am left with $39. Let's now subtract $5 for fuel and I still have $34. The government will want 15% of this ($5.10) leaving me with $28.90. I will now divide my $28.90 by 5.5 which is the number of hours I was at the job site and find that I made a total of $5.25 per hour.

It's good to be self employed :)

Actually it is really good to be self employed. When things like today happen, I just count is as learning. When I consider the fact that many people spend thousand of dollars for a degree that they may or may not use, I realize that eating the cost of a $30 door isn't so bad so long as I learned something along the way.