The laundry in Our Humble O-Bode is a small alcove off the dining room, just big enough to hold a washer and a dryer, hidden behind a pair of bi-fold doors, or they were until one set of the doors fell off a while back. A quick inspection immediately following the falling-off revealed that the high-impact plastic pivot the door hangs from had apparently had enough of that high-impact shit and snapped in half. Bummer.

There was no way to fix it, so I drove down to Menard’s this morning to see about buying a replacement. Or, not exactly a replacement. I tried buying what looked like a replacement, but this is a set of bi-fold doors that are probably fifty years old. Might have even been made right here in the United States. Yes, that old. The piece that I thought might be a workable replacement wasn’t even close, and thought I tried, I couldn’t modify it to make it close. This time around, I bought something that looked like I could modify it, and I even came pretty darned close but, after tinkering with it half the morning and for about an hour after lunch, I gave up and started looking for other possibilities.

The one that I like the best: Get somebody else to pick up our clothes and wash them for us. Sadly, this is probably the least likely scenario we can expect to see in the near future.

The one I like the least: Replacing the doors, not because it would be too difficult – I’m pretty sure I could handle it – but because it would cost more than paying somebody to wash our clothes for us. Really. Go price some bi-fold doors and see if I’m kidding.

But there are several hardware kits available. I think I should be able to rip all the old hardware off the doors and install modern hardware that should do the job for the next fifty years, or until I’m pushing up the daisies. So, yeah. I’m going with that.