We’ve been correcting the door on the larder for the last few days. Excuse the fancy terms; we do tend to take the mickey sometimes. Our house was built many years ago for a family that had achieved moderate success rather than great wealth or just enough to keep out of the workhouse, so it isn’t grand and it isn’t basic. It has a cupboard set into the wall next to the cooker that we use to stack food in, and we can’t help but call it the larder.
The problem with the larder door is – well, it has two problems. First, it’s old. We don’t know how old the house is, but its builders weren’t working to a set of standard plans and the whole place has settled since then. The doorframes have twisted just a little – a lot, in one case. We think the larder door dates back to the 1930’s, and we do know that the owner before us tried to liven the whole house up by having all the doors dipped and stripped of their 1960’s paint, which is the root of the second problem.
We’ve pieced the whole thing together like some comedy village murder mystery over the years. First, he took off the doors and took all the ironwork off them – knobs, hinges, latches and catches. Then he sent them off to be dipped in acid and washed off. When they came back, he realised that he hadn’t noted which hinge set went with each door. There’s shadow marks on one door where a long ornate hinge used to be, different to the short square hinge that’s holding the door to the frame now – the long ornate hinge is on a different door, the one that clearly used to have little hinges like those on a box. Worse, the doors warped and cracked as they dried. Some don’t close all the way up, with the top bent a good four inches out of true, and the cracks are wide enough to see through.
It might sound easy to replace the doors. But. There are standard door sizes these days. Not one of the internal doors in our house is a modern standard size, and not one is the same size as any other door. We thought at first we could get a modern door and cut it to size, except – the widest doors are too wide for this treatment while the tallest are too tall.
We’re refurbishing the larder door. He’s been re-setting the hinges and bending the latch back into shape; I’ve been holding the door up while he notes where to cut a recess for the hinges, and chipping the crusty remains of bright blue paint from the grooves in the door. It’s taken me all day so far and we’re left with a door that looks like a plain and elderly wooden door of a simple design. It suits the kitchen beautifully. Give us another day at this, and the damn thing will also SHUT, for the first time in years.
Julia Chalkley 