My wife and I have been painting our old place, getting it ready to sell, and in order to easily paint the closet too, we pulled the set of bi-fold doors off. These things (zoomed in to the top and bottom hardware):

Even getting these things off can be tricky—mostly because the top hardware can get a bit stuck in the top bracket, and/or the top bracket can come out of the track—but they popped off easily enough.

Getting them back on?

That was supposed to be the quick part of the day, but it ended up being the whole day.

One of them went on beautifully, in just a few minutes. But of course, that was beginner’s luck. We got the second one into position and…the top pivot, the little metal rod that retracts down and pops back up into the top bracket, was about two millimeters too high after depressing it all the way. Two millimeters, that is from, being able to clear the track, which is the same height as the hole in the top bracket.

This is the part I’m talking about:

And when pushed in all the way, it just wasn’t quite enough:

I think some top pivots depress all the way, but the version in my door did not. And nothing would generate those two millimeters of clearance.

One possibility in such a circumstance is to secure the top pivot first, and then angle the bottom pivot down into the hole in the bottom bracket (there’s also the wheel, but it never gave us any trouble at all). Theoretically that shouldn’t work, but if I’ve learned anything from doing home improvement, it’s that you never know what will work.

So we tried that, and the missing millimeters now manifested themselves in the bottom pivot dragging on the carpet and making it so close to the bottom bracket. Until, that is, the pressure was too much and the bottom pivot snapped out of its hole, which was drilled a little too big.

The thing must have been held in with some now-spent adhesive. I had a tube, which I could use to glue it back in nice and tight. Only it was back at the house.

So I ran back, grabbed my strongest glue, filled the bottom of the oversized hole, and carefully placed the bottom pivot back in, with enough glue pushing up the sides that it would probably be even more secure than before. Nothing would make that pop out again. I even brought a small clamp to apply a touch of pressure, just in case that would somehow help.

While we waited for the glue to set, we did some cleaning and other stuff for awhile. But we still had to figure out those two millimeters. I recalled from previously working with my dad on a different bi-fold door that the bottom pivot could be adjusted. In other words, the two millimeters could be obtained by adjusting the bottom downward by that amount. Some bottom pivots are screws that you can simply adjust by hand, like this:

However, mine had a nut at the top that needed to be turned with a particular size wrench. Using my hands, or even a pliers, wouldn’t budge it.

And I that wrench. But it was back at the house. Somewhere. Where did my wrench set end up in the move? Then I thought maybe I could replace the bottom pivot with one of those readily adjustable ones.

Oops, we glued the old one in so it would be nice and solid and secure!

Well. We might have been at an impasse. But serendipitously, the previous owner of our new house appears to have been a bi-fold door collector. There are two or three sets of them in our basement, and a dozen or so in the attic, some of them even laid down as informal flooring (they’re hollow-core, so I’m not sure that’s a great idea. I can just see a Farmers home insurance commercial where a guy needs his second-floor ceiling replaced because he fell right through it when the hollow-core door posing as attic flooring gave way. “We know a thing or two because we’ve seen a thing or two!”)

So we went back to the house—again—and, as a quick run to the basement confirmed, the previous owner had never removed the hardware from his collection of doors. And, even more serendipitously, the top pivot on one of the cast-off doors in my new basement retracted all the way down, to the point where it was flush with the door. That would more than clear the track, and then pop right back into the top bracket. I just needed to swap parts.

All that had to happen now was that neither the door in my new basement nor the door in my old closet had its top pivot glued in. And—it felt, truly, like a prayer was being answered—the piece of hardware in the basement slid right out of the door.

We expectantly drove back to the old place, grabbed the top pivot on the closet door, and—nothing. A nice, wide, sturdy flat-blade screwdriver would probably do the trick, except I also didn’t know where that had ended up (probably back at house). In frustration, I grabbed the hammer—the one tool I did have—and tried to simply hammer the metal rod down, just in case that would make it retract all the way. No dice.

At this point, my wife pointed out that hammers have a nail-pulling side as well as a hammering side, which did not occur to me even while I was using the hammer. She got the edge of the top pivot around the hammer, levered it away, and bam, the top pivot was out. The new one fit snugly in, no glue needed.

And the door went right back on and closed more smoothly than before.

Pretty much every closet I saw when I was a kid had an actual door on it, with hinges off on one side. These certainly can be difficult to remove too—particularly when someone has painted over all of the hinge hardware—but the difference for me is that they’re immediately intuitive. I like a product or a design where you can take a quick look at the thing and basically understand how it works.

Traditional furniture is like that. It goes together in the way you expect it too, pretty much. If you were told to make a table or desk or chair, without any instructions, you’d probably make a very crude version of a real, solid-wood table, desk, or chair.

But the particle-board stuff—technically known as flat-pack furniture—goes together in ways that are completely counterintuitive and non-obvious. I remember taking apart an old desk at my previous job. We basically had to know how it went together in order to take it apart. None of the pieces were joined where it looked like they were.

Putting this stuff together myself, I always find it hard to believe that I’m even building the thing pictured on the box until the last few steps. (And of course, particle board is notorious for only ever going together once; all the bracket and cam holes strip and can’t really be fixed without gluing the thing together the second time.)

So in handling lots of different stuff around the home over several years, I’ve come to appreciate simple, functional, intuitive products. Of course, if you work with this wonky stuff long enough, you start to get the logic of it. After working with the closet doors this much, I could do it again with a lot less trouble. Maybe, for example, I can fix this one in our new house that springs back out every time you close it.

But it still feels complicated.

Sort of like my new fridge, which has a touchscreen menu instead of a traditional dial for adjusting the temperature. Guess what that means? If, say, your power is cutting in and out during a windstorm the first week you’re in your new house, you can’t dial the fridge off when the power is out to protect it from potential surges.

Maybe—hopefully not—that’s another piece.

Related Reading:

A Hard Day’s Wash, Part 2

A Repair Journey Through Low-Cost Manufacturing

Sink Me Now

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