garage door.

Hmm, let's see. For the past five years of owning this house, I have clicked the garage door shut ... then waited twenty seconds or however long it took for it to drop all the way down and - wait for it - perfectly timed it to click the button again when it hit the ground to stop it. You know, to keep it from popping back up. Yep ... five years.

I looked at it probably four-and-a-half years ago - apparently not very hard cos I gave up and just disconnected the lead traveling to the far end of the rail (attached to the sensor that's supposed to stop it when it hits the pavement) cos for some reason it didn't work when that lead was attached.

But today ... after some prodding from Katie on the trainride home and her coming out to look at it while I busied myself testing out the planer (it works great - I'm excited to get to work on the garage trim) - we took a closer look.

It didn't take long for me to see that there was a small piece of metal that was the culprit. The way it works for those not well-versed in the operation of electric garage door mechanisms is the door travels down the rail and trips a little lever that in turn is supposed to push that piece of metal up so it makes an electrical connection - apparently telling the motor to stop. Well - all these years - it turns out the problem was (wait for it ... ) - that piece of metal was bent so it was constantly making that connection. Hence - the reason the door wouldn't go back up if the lead was connected (cos it was sending a 'stop' signal to the motor).

So I simply unbent the metal and wallah - it works! It totally works! Now I'll just have to get used to the fact that I no longer have to wait for it to get to the bottom to press the button again. And in hindsight - it was an incredibly easy fix that for whatever reason I completely missed figuring out four-and-a-half years ago.

ps - all the trim, the 2x4 rakes under the gable and the b-ball hoop are ripped off or down. I need to get a 12x12" square cedar gable vent to replace the crap metal one in there now and another porch light from Rejuvenation (or possibly three - one by the people door and two - one on either side of the garage door).