The new patio door was installed in the dining-room yesterday with maximum strain on a crew of three carpenters. The outside temperature at noon was about -13C and never clambered any higher than that, so the house was thoroughly chilled by the time they finished.

Everything went fairly swimmingly until the original garden door was extracted and the new door -- carefully measured not once, not twice, but four times -- DID NOT FIT. Close examination revealed that the two-by-four framing timbers were set in crooked, so the opening did not have four 90-degree angles, but instead was a parallelogram wider at the top than the bottom. Much agony ensued.

Every installation job of this type involves extensive shimming, so the shop materials brought for the job included one great big box of long, skinny wedges of wood used to square up the new door (or window, or cabinet) from side to side, and another great big box of thin, flat shingle-like pieces to be stacked on the sill-plate to bring the door to a certain height -- usually about an inch -- above the level of the interior floor. By the time they had finished, both boxes were empty and the crew chief had sent back for more.

To set the new door into the irregular opening, the carpenters had to left it into the frame, add shims, add more shims, take out some shims, put in more shims, check the level, and then take the whole thing apart and start again -- at least six times. They all went for lunch at about 2:00 p.m., then came back and resumed the attack. I offered tea and biscuits at 4:30, but they had finally achieved the correct degree of plumb-ness and level-ness and could not stop until the job was finished.

The entire job was supposed to take "a couple of hours". The crew arrived at about 9:15 a.m. and the last guy left at about 6:30 p.m., sweeping up plaster dust as he went.

We now have only the tiler to go, and I'm not sure if the kitchen contractor even knows where he is, let alone when he is prepared to tackle our backsplash and the holes in our floor. That will be the last major messy and expensive thing we do to this house for a long, long time.