Being a doctor to the house!

As a owner of an old house, one has to learn to take care of it in the "right way" (especially, in our case, the right way can be a bit complicated).
Now, the most interesting one is related to the garage doors. The garage doors project is a very good example of an eternal one (still details need to be refined, although this summer I spent some time painting minor parts, including the new irons).
The frames are landing on the ground and thanks to that they absorb humidity and they are slightly rotten on the bottom.

Linseed oil injection for the door frame

For taking care of them, a hole have been drilled on the side and I am on a daily base injecting linseed, so that the wood get saturated of it and will not absorb anymore the humidity from the ground. 

I just wonder if I am doing right. The oil comes out of the holes when I am pushing it in (I guess it means I have filled it..) and I wonder how long I am going to do this. The wood has to stop to suck the oil in. 

I am waiting from a notification from the door frame...

Since we are on the garage doors topic, I will follow up on my trip to the blacksmith, which was (finally) fruitful. 

Not only I got fixed a minor detail on a candelabrum, but I eventually got fixed also the handles of the garage door. With how much they cost, I could have probably bought 3-4 of them, second hand, but I thought it was worthy to think that these were the handles that all the owners of our house had held when opening the garage. 

Maybe I should be more cost oriented and less nostalgic?

Internal side of the door

External side of the door

What is missing?
First of all the plates to have around he handle and the key hole.
As we have had the carpenter adjusting the lock plate and adding some rings to the irons, since the doors were not aligned, I have also that minor painting to do.

The final healing procedure is related to the metal in the roof. As we have started the painting project, of course we have got some water leak that has made some nice humidity stain appear just above the piano and has made a minor mess in the tower room.
I am not sure I can state it is a coincidence that we have had someone on the roof and all of a sudden (although he has swore he didn't wash that metal since it looked rusty) we get a water leak, but indipendently of his action the metal is not in the best state ever.
This of course was completely invisible 3 years ago when we did the roof renovation... right!?
For once I will not try to hunt down our roof company, as we have had already plenty of discussions with them at the time of the work.

It is hard to see from the pic, but there are a lot of small holes.

The rubber mass that has been sed for protecting the metal has started to get loose

More on the bad state

Today there will be a plater (plåtslagare) coming by and check this out. I know this is not going to be a smooth operation.

Since he is here, I will also ask him to check the possibility to do the fitting for the eaves for the pool house. We want to have it in aluzink (so it should be easier to paint) but there is not available from the producers. 

I am a bit concerned in having two companies working with the metal there, although it is a minor project and I would prefer to have just one (and the more competent one on the matter).

Let's see...

Just a minor hole in a very peculiar corner, not sure this is a culprit to the water leakage

Closing (almost) the doors

After several weeks of work and wasting a lot of time in other things, we finally got the doors back in their place.

The garage with its doors

Things worked almost fine, with a small exception (of course, as always it generates additional extra work). Since the bottom of the doors got cut off because in bad state and for avoiding to touch the ground, the "holder" doesn't reach the hole in the ground anymore, so the doors do not "stay put", so to speak.
I realize this explanation doesn't help much, but the only thing is that I will invoke the power of the blacksmith to come and see if there is anything smart he can do to fix the problem.

That's how they look inside (yes, temporary handle and still unfinished details)

That is not the only thing missing though. Painting of the metal is still prio 1 and, after putting the doors back, there are some minor patches that need to be painted again (the top of the door frame and the door got scratched initially, because the door was too "uptight", where the doors were leaning there are minor marks of the pieces of textile that were just under, ...) .

Still a lot of work to do... 

The main problem is that the season is not very favorable anymore for painting, although I have challenged the weather in many other occasions with discrete results.
Now, let's see how long more I have to deal with these doors until they can be really considered finished. Because, after all. I still miss the right handle to close them...! Blacksmith, where are you?!!?

Switching the door handles

When we moved in our house three years ago, we noticed that there was an high variety of handles for the different doors.
Some are possibly the original ones, some other got exchange with more modern handles during the years. Why, it is a mistery, but nevertheless, the strangest handle we had got was in the bathroom we had just renovated.

Bathroom handle

A part some slight issue in closing properly the door, the bathroom could not get locked (we had no key).

Additionally, we had problems with the handle in Oscar's bedroom door which was falling apart every now and hand and once removed, shown that the door was half broken around the handle itself.

Oscar's door handle

Oscar's door handle

We change Oscar's handle with one that is similar to most of our handles. We bought the new handle and the toilet lock mechanism at Byggfabriken. We were a bit in hurry to change the handles because we would have guests for many weeks and we were expecting Oscar. We started to fix this in December 2013 and a first carpenter made the switch possible.

Detail of the new handle over the brittle wood in the door

A new handle for Oscar's bedroom door (trycke pärlrand)

However he refused to fix the brittle wood of Oscar's door, stating it was not possible and hence we asked a second opinion., During spring 2014 a second carpenter fixed the broken wood, although with some minor imperfections, which generated more work for us.

The work done by both carpenter was not completed or "perfect" and hence we decided to try to polish the approximative work.

The bathroom door handle is waiting for a beauty treatment.

More tape

It was finally few days ago, that I started to complete the job. We have been having tape over the metal details of the handle for over an year!

Treament is completed

The toilet is free!

For the bathroom door it was necessary to apply some putty around the handle and after polishing everything, I had to paint.
For Oscar's bedroom door instead, the problem was that some paint had been leaving drop marks. I had to scrape them off a little and after a light polishing I painted over. I was not able to get otherwise a decently homogeneous surface.

The door is finally repaired