When is a door not a door?

When it's ajar. Also, as it happens, a door is not very useful when it's stuck closed, as we learned yesterday. The front door to Generous Servings had seen a lot of life before we moved in, and its condition didn't improve during the months of our renovations: there was about a week in the midst of heavy construction traffic when the threshold was hanging in midair after the original floor was removed from under it, and then our double stacked ovens were somehow forced through the door even though they're a few inches wider than the opening, and we have stomped in and out a hundred million times over the past 15 months. We've wanted to replace the door, for both functional and aesthetic reasons, but when we looked into this a while ago, we got sticker shock ($2000? For the cheap model?) and gave up.

Last week we decided it was time to do something about the half-inch crack under the door, especially since it's -15 degrees in the sun these days. So we got a door sweep, and asked our handy employee Travis to install it. It didn't totally block the crack, but it was an improvement. Until yesterday.

After we closed, we had a customer show up to drop off knives to be sharpened, so we let him in. On his way out he tried to pull the door instead of push it, and to everyone's surprise, the door wouldn't budge after that. We let him out the back door and proceeded to kick the bottom corner of the front door with Jill's steel-toed boots, but it was seriously not going to move. We determined that the new door sweep had gotten wedged under the door, making it impossible to push the door outwards. Jill and I took turns going outside (using the back door) into the sub-zero degree weather and pulling on the front door while the other person pushed. We worked on it for a long time, including jamming all the tools we had available under the door to try to push the sweep out (unsuccessfully).


Jill had to go home, so we started testing our keys to the other entrances to the building, in case we really couldn't use the front door. We discovered that we didn't have the correct keys to either our back door or Happy Cakes' front door, and when we tried the key to Happy Cakes' back door, the lock core fell out of the door. Therefore, one of us would have to stay in the building until we could get the front door open, or we'd be totally locked out. I volunteered to take the late shift.

Finally I had to call Travis to come bust me out. He heroically left a dinner party and arrived with more appropriate tools. He used a combination of a crowbar and brute force and managed to force the door opened, which resulted in the door sweep getting bent. We stepped outside to survey the damage, and Travis let the door swing closed to illustrate the problem. The door got stuck closed again, this time with both of us on the outside, neither of us with a key that worked in any door that would actually open, and me wearing just a sweatshirt (I mean, I had pants and shoes on too). It would have been a pretty funny scene if we were in a movie and I was not in danger of freezing to death on the doorstep of my own business.

Luckily the door wasn't stuck quite as firmly this time, so we were able to get it open after some tugging. We've removed the new door sweep so the problem won't recur, but this has been enough to convince us that it's time for a new door. Now we have to start the arduous process of getting people to show up and give us quotes, which in my past experience has been terribly difficult. Oh well, it's better than being trapped in Generous Servings.