My name is Eleanor, and I fix things
Tuesday morning, our overhead garage door malfunctioned. It started to open, hiccupped, then the two parts of the trolley parted company and the only way to open it was manually. Yesterday, I tried to troubleshoot it. This wasn't easy, as it was Frickin' Hot out in the garage, plus to get a good look at things I needed to go up a ladder.
I came to the hesitant conclusion that we needed a new trolley. This was complicated by the age of the opener - it's 11 years old - but I was making headway looking for something online, when I realized I didn't know exactly how to reengage the trolley. The diagrams in the manual suggested you needed to pull the red cord, and the lever it's attached to, back at about a 45 degree angle to vertical, when in actuality, it has to be pulled more like 90 degrees from vertical to snap in again. So, once I figured that out, I was back to square one: what made it jam in the first place?
I ran it up again, and this time my attention was drawn to the place, about three feet from the ground, on one side of the door, where the rollers on the door go up through the side track. Recently, I pulled out a garbage can we used to have loose mulch in. It's been stored in that corner for a year or more, and on the floor beneath it was a nut. This is not Big News - I consider myself The Queen of Fasteners - but its presence so close to where the door was jamming suggested something. I looked at the track, and sure enough, there was a bolt at that point, holding two sections of track together, that was minus its nut. The bolt had then started working its way back out of the track, and its head was causing the jam. A screwdriver, a few minutes' more time, and the whole thing was back in operation again. I'm so glad I didn't do the typical thing, and grab the phone to call a repair company. I R smart. :-)
I then went out to water my tomatoes, and as I did so, I looked back at the spot in the yard where I transplanted two baby mulberry trees this past spring. Right after I transplanted them, we had the first of many bizarre spikes in heat, and I was pretty sure I'd lost them. This despite watering them like crazy, and even (see the picture below) wrapping them in this weird landscape fabric I bought in the spring to use as a row cover and protect plants. They looked like a little ghost out there.
The second picture shows what I saw yesterday: new leaves amidst all the dead ones on one of those little trees. I am so thrilled, especially because I'd given up watering them, and they've been struggling on their own, in this godforsaken weather. Poor babies, well one still looks dead, but the other, yay! I am particularly grateful for trees, because, despite the rough weather we're having, our yard looks relatively green, and it's primarily because of all the trees I've planted over the years. Our neighbors' yards look terrible, unless they've been using sprinkler systems or above-ground sprinklers. Yes, we've been watering, but not that much.
I came to the hesitant conclusion that we needed a new trolley. This was complicated by the age of the opener - it's 11 years old - but I was making headway looking for something online, when I realized I didn't know exactly how to reengage the trolley. The diagrams in the manual suggested you needed to pull the red cord, and the lever it's attached to, back at about a 45 degree angle to vertical, when in actuality, it has to be pulled more like 90 degrees from vertical to snap in again. So, once I figured that out, I was back to square one: what made it jam in the first place?
I ran it up again, and this time my attention was drawn to the place, about three feet from the ground, on one side of the door, where the rollers on the door go up through the side track. Recently, I pulled out a garbage can we used to have loose mulch in. It's been stored in that corner for a year or more, and on the floor beneath it was a nut. This is not Big News - I consider myself The Queen of Fasteners - but its presence so close to where the door was jamming suggested something. I looked at the track, and sure enough, there was a bolt at that point, holding two sections of track together, that was minus its nut. The bolt had then started working its way back out of the track, and its head was causing the jam. A screwdriver, a few minutes' more time, and the whole thing was back in operation again. I'm so glad I didn't do the typical thing, and grab the phone to call a repair company. I R smart. :-)
I then went out to water my tomatoes, and as I did so, I looked back at the spot in the yard where I transplanted two baby mulberry trees this past spring. Right after I transplanted them, we had the first of many bizarre spikes in heat, and I was pretty sure I'd lost them. This despite watering them like crazy, and even (see the picture below) wrapping them in this weird landscape fabric I bought in the spring to use as a row cover and protect plants. They looked like a little ghost out there.
The second picture shows what I saw yesterday: new leaves amidst all the dead ones on one of those little trees. I am so thrilled, especially because I'd given up watering them, and they've been struggling on their own, in this godforsaken weather. Poor babies, well one still looks dead, but the other, yay! I am particularly grateful for trees, because, despite the rough weather we're having, our yard looks relatively green, and it's primarily because of all the trees I've planted over the years. Our neighbors' yards look terrible, unless they've been using sprinkler systems or above-ground sprinklers. Yes, we've been watering, but not that much.