Some of this DIY stuff is so much more complicated than it looks.
After a hint from a friend of ours who came for dinner a while back, we decided to finally put proper locks on our bathroom doors. Well, not locks, but little sliding latches.
“Easy”, I thought. Jusy buy ’em, from B&Q, fix one bit to the door and another bit to the frame and Bob’s your uncle!
Not so! Did you know that there are two types of simple sliding latch? I didn’t!
The first one went on fine. More fluke than anything.
I got the first bit of the second one on and then suddenly realised that it was not going to work. I had to go and buy another latch of a slightly different type!
A quick explanation. It all depends on which side of the door you’re on. From one side a door closes agains the frame. I’ll call this the “outside” of the door. When the door is closed it sits behind a chunk of wood. In this case you can use a latch which slides into a hole in the frame. Like this…
If you’re on the “inside” of the door, the door is flush with the frame – so you don’t have the chunk of wood to drill a big hole into. So you have to have a raised “hole” for the latch to fit into. Like this…
It WELL confused me for a while. It all makes perfect sense now but why didn’t we think of it before? How am I supposed to know that there’s two different sorts of latch.
I believe this is what people call “trial and error”. I sense there may be more of this ahead!