Remove the Sage to Reveal All the Pine

(Sing to the tune of Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme)

I bought a 101-year-old house a few years ago. The old oak woodwork in the front of the house is beautiful, but almost every bit of wood trim - and the doors - in the rest of the house is covered with sage green paint. I think the previous owners got a deal in the '70s. So the summer after we moved in, I was determined to strip all that green away, down to the Southern Yellow Pine. I began with the downstairs bathroom door. (And to be perfectly clear: We ripped out the lovely green carpeting shown in the photos above before we moved in.)

E figured I spent at least 20 hours refinishing that door. Removing all the hardware (but leaving in the lock mechanism) was one of the most time-consuming parts of the job, but I wanted to clean off decades of gunk. As I so often do, I procrastinated finishing the job and rehanging the door until it was absolutely necessary. I tried convincing E that we could tell the Japanese student who was soon to arrive and spend the school year with us that in America we don't have bathroom doors. Since our future guest had been in Seattle a few weeks and was pretty savvy in general, we decided that wouldn't work.

So before E was to be picked up for a babysitting job, we set about the rehanging project. To save time, I didn't put the doorknob back in. I figured I could do that after the door was in place. E helped balance the heavy door while I aligned the hinges and dropped in the pins. The door shut neatly, and just as we were giving each other high-fives, we realized our boo-boo and screamed, "Noooooooo!" Armed with a screw driver and ball-peen hammer, we tried to nudge the pins back out. I poked and prodded the lock mechanism to no avail. The only opening to the outside world was the 3-inch hole for the doorknob and the tiny little vent in the shower.

Our only hope for rescue was the babysitting gig. We'd left the back door unlocked, so figured my sister would come let us out when E didn't respond to her honking the horn in the driveway. Only moments after we had comforted one another with that thought, the phone rang. Plans changed: no need for a sitter.

Ruh roh.

It was a steamy 98 degree day, and that windowless room was beyond tropical, so we stretched out on the floor to allow our melting brains to think.

After more than an hour, I realized our only viable escape plan was for me to knock out the thin, lower panel on the door. With the ball-peen hammer. We crawled out and I ran to get the doorknob assembly, which I promptly reinstalled and then opened the door properly. Since the door panel broke out in long pieces, I was able to fit it all back together later like a puzzle. In retrospect, I wish I'd thought to put a towel over the hammer to reduce the number of ding marks on the door. And I should have used glue, since the "puzzle" fell apart once in the winter when the wood had dried out. Our exchange student helped me glue it back together. (By that time, she'd heard the story plus experienced a few of her own so the little craft project didn't phase her in the least.)

Removing the (rest of) the sage to reveal all the pine is taking a little longer than I'd hoped.