Good Timing

This morning we had a little incident in the yard  (photo is from after some of the cleanup was performed).

One of the big oak trees fell and apparently made quite a racket. Fortunately no one was in the way at the time so there were no injuries.

Had this happened a couple of weeks ago during the party, a bunch of people would have gotten squished...

The top of the tree landed on the wall and obstructed the sidewalk.

In the process it took out one of the apple trees (you can see what's left of it on the right side of the photo holding up the top of the oak) and most of the other.

Once it's all cleaned up we'll be able to better evaluate the damage and determine next steps.

Latches

A couple of weeks ago I received complaints that the door from the garage to the carriage house wouldn't open.

I quickly tried it a couple of times with no success and declared it out of scope for the party.

I didn't want to get into yet another project, because I had a feeling...

And I was right.

As always, it's never easy.

I devoted some time over the weekend to tackling the problem.

After messing about for a bit I still had no luck and decided to take off the doorknob so I could see what was going on.

Regardless of what I did, the latch wouldn't fully retract. I even took off the casing on the interior of the door and tried various tools to force it.

Eventually I ended up removing the hinge pins and taking the door off completely.

Then I could remove the entire latch mechanism.

This must be a common failure because the big box stores stock the specific replacement part for the failed component.

It's sad that we have fully functioning 100+ year-old door latches, but these modern ones, that I installed, break in less than 10 years...