Spigots, pocket doors, and Handyman Dan

The cold water spigot on the laundry tub was leaking and the wonderful wife insisted we have it taken care of.  Personally, I didn't think it was a big deal and I would have let the darned thing drip from now until doomsday. But the nagging!  My god, the nagging!!  So, I essayed replacing a washer.  I approached the job with less trepidation than most of my repair efforts; after all, I had replaced washers lots of times in the past (with varying degrees of success).  A visit to Home Depot landed me an assortment of washers, and a visit to YouTube found me a refresher on how to remove the stem from a spigot.  I went to work.  Naturally, the assortment of washers didn't contain the size and shape I wanted, but I took the stem over to Booz Plumbing and found what I needed without any trouble.  Remarkably, re-installation of the stem presented no problems, the spigot doesn't drip and, most important, the infernal nagging has finally stopped!

Our dining room and breakfast room are separated by sliding doors — doors that slide into "pockets" in the wall.  "Pocket doors," get it?  Well, last time the cleaning ladies were here, one of them managed to knock a door off its track.  Just lift the darned thing up and put it back on, right?  Nope.  It's a heavy door, impossible to get a good grip on, and, most important, the wheels on the top of the door didn't line up with the track: If the track runs east to west, the wheels had somehow twisted themselves into a northeast - southwest orientation.  The handyman was stumped, so he did nothing, letting the untracked door stand in the middle of the doorway for a week and a half while wondering whom he could get to fix it.  (That "whom" really looks odd.  No one says "whom" any more.)  Or maybe the handyman's subconscious was hard at work the whole time.  Eventually, he slipped a strap under the door; it would allow him to lift the door and jiggle it around with one hand.  He also looped a thin gauge wire around one set of wheels on top of the door; it would allow him to use the other hand to pull the wheels into something more closely approximating the orientation of the track. The strap and the wire — and a good bit of dumb luck — took care of the problem.