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Our new storm door arrived the other day.

It’s a nice door, not top of the line because I refuse to pay more for a custom order storm door than I would a used car… but it’s a decent quality. Better than the floor models they have in stock.

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And as you can see, my husband paid close attention to the opening instructions.

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The box promised “Easy Installation” so we figured we could handle it.

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We were wrong.

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The instructions were daunting, and not overly clear.

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We had to check them so many times, I taped the sheet to the kitchen door for easy reference.

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We spent a good hour getting prepped and making sure everything was positioned properly.

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And then spent another hour installing the hinge rail…. incorrectly.

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Which, by the Swiss cheese condition of the door frame? Clearly we weren’t the first to do.

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After another hour of fiddling… we high fived. The door was hung.

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This particular door has two hydraulic thingamabobs… you know, the doohickeys that hold it open. They’re not always easy to seat, so those instructions were taped to the door as well.

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The bottom one gave us trouble, as evidenced by the husband lying down on the job. It has this special whatchamacallit you tap with your foot to freeze the door open and it kept getting in the way of the screws needed to secure it.

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Another hour later, for a total of four, the door was hung. The whoosits were in place and we were ready to put on the handles and locks.

The ones the salesman told us came with the door.

The ones we didn’t have because they didn’t come with the door.

The ones the instructions said came separately.

The ones we had to make an hour long round trip to the store to purchase for an extra $100.

Grrr. 😡

By the time we got back, five and a half hours into the “easy installation”… we called it quits for the day and retired to the barn porch for adult beverages.

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With Lord Dudley Mountcatten trying in vain to push open the halfway installed door.

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