Back on the ‘baie’

My new ‘baie coulissante’ that is. Today was supposed to be a piece of cake compared to yesterday but it wasn’t, far from it. Wim arrived at 9.30 am after I thought I’d have all the rest of the frame fixing screws in, but without exception every single one went wrong, so I decided to come back to them once we’d got the doors in.

In theory, all we needed to do was lift the doors up, offer them into the frame on a slant to slot the top of each door in and then lift the bottoms up and over and drop them onto their respective bottom rails. But it didn’t work out like that. It appears that the supplier of my new patio door likes to work to a precision of a millimetre or so and no matter what we did, after slotting the door tops into place, we couldn’t lift the doors high enough to get them over the edge of the bottom frame. And as they were already fully glazed and incredibly heavy, we also had to make sure we didn’t do any damage including dropping them while we were heaving and straining.

It turned out the the door tops were fouling on a fibre sliding pad that had been installed in the top channel during manufacture and also the heads of the fixing screws that we’d used to attach the frame top to the underside of the door beam. The only solution was to remove the screws, which was made more complicated by the fact that having been screwed in they didn’t want to come out again.

In fact we managed to get away with removing just the one in the centre by cutting it with a hacksaw blade inserted between the frame and the beam and replacing it with a large flat-headed one. Eventually, we finally managed to get the doors in after much extra effort that wouldn’t have been necessary if the manufacturer had reduced the height of each door by just a millimetre or so.

Here’s how the job looked at that stage.

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That meant that Wim was then able to head off and leave me to the finishing up, which included fitting the door handles, getting the locks working and adding the final trimming pieces, all of which was made more tiresome than necessary by the almost complete absence of meaningful instructions which has dogged us the whole way through the job. Nevertheless, I managed to get all that ‘sundry’ stuff done in time to go and do a bit of shopping in the early evening.

I didn’t take any pictures as I decided that I might as well leave that until I’ve got as far as I can do tomorrow, which will hopefully be with all the securing screws in, sealant applied around the whole frame inside and out and the whole job made clean and tidy. That will only leave the making good to be done which, as the job will by then be fully weather-tight, I’ll be able to do at my leisure.

We’ve been very lucky with the weather which has stayed fine despite a few light showers that haven’t disrupted us at all. If it stays that way until I’ve at least done the external sealing and making good, that’ll mean that I can get on and organise my winter wood supply. That’s now becoming a high priority, especially as this year I’ll again have to cut it myself down from standard metre lengths to sizes that my stove can handle. And as that’ll mean keeping the uncut wood outside while I’m cutting and splitting it to go into my store, I really do need for the weather to stay dry the whole time while I’m doing it 😕

2 thoughts on “Back on the ‘baie’

  1. Thanks for the suggestion Les. I thought along those lines when I was working on my aircraft in my back garden but never got around to doing it. It’s not so much of a problem though when I’m cutting and splitting wood for my woodburner because the splitter is inside my wood store anyway and if I have to leave wood outside I have to cover it with a waterproof tarpaulin anyway. Then I just wait for the rain to stop and uncover it so I can cut it up, which doesn’t take too long on a dry day. I was caught out by a shower this time because I wasn’t paying attention 🙂

  2. I’ve been following, and enjoying, your blog for some time now and as I was reading the last paragraph or two regards keeping your wood dry while you work on it, I had a thought. Back here in the UK these days I frequently see builders & car mechanics working on/at private houses have been temporarily erecting gazebos to work under. I wondered if that may be a solution for those outside jobs that you need to keep dry. Cheers carry on the good work Les

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