Look what we can do

We've become Mr. and Ms. Fix It since we moved in to our new house. Today we replaced a screen in a sliding screen door! Our house has stayed pretty cool through out this early heat wave, except for our TV room. It gets hot in there because there is a huge sliding glass door and window that faces the west and the sun streams in and it heats up the room like crazy. I fished out the sliding screen from under the deck a few days ago and this is what it looked like before we fixed it: Notice the massive hole in the bottom of the screen. It was big enough for a pig with human flu to get through. So we trotted off to our local big box hardware store to see what replacement doors or screen repair kits cost. After much debate we decided to get a roll of screen, some spline (that's the stuff the holds the screen in place in the groove in the screen door), and a spline intaller tool to fix the door with.

So this afternoon I ripped out the old screen and the old spline and I cleaned the door. Then when Sparky got home from work we installed the new screen and this is what it looks like now: It's fantastic now. We can open the door and let the room cool off naturally and leave it open all the while we watch TV at night. Before we had to close it after an hour or so because moths and other insects were coming in. Now we can leave it open and enjoy the night air! It was actually insanely easy to install the new screen, the only hard part was getting the door into the track after we fixed it. All in all it cost us about $28 to fix the door and it would have cost us Jeebus knows how much to get a custom made door if we had to go that route. So we saved a bunch a money by doing it ourselves and we got the cool night air without bugs every night if we want it. Boo ya!