Spending a penny for the toilet door - Joe Bennett

A toilet needs a door, as Joe Bennett discovered. Photo /123rf

There’s a lavatory – or rather, according to your personal euphemism-quotient preference, a toilet, WC, cloakroom, bathroom, rest-room, powder-room, little boys’ room, little girls’ room, convenience, jakes, bog, dunny or john – in my garage. It has a sliding door. But you know how it is with sliding doors. One day last week it didn’t.

The door stalled. It juddered. The base slipped off the rail on which it ran. This caused the top to escape the little metal pelmet designed to prevent it from falling, and it fell. It fell with a crash on the concrete floor of the garage. One of its glass panes shattered and with it my faith.

For this dunny door had fallen or almost fallen too many times. It was a liability I wanted out of my life. Rather than travel any further with it down time’s highway, I would park it in the Layby of Oblivion. And I would not be coming back to collect it. The door and I were done.

I studied the thing on the garage floor. How had I borne it so long? Metal-framed, ostensibly decorative, it belonged to a walk-in wardrobe from the funkier end of the 1960s. Installing it in my garage lavatory had been someone else’s idea of DIY a long time back.

I clambered on to a chair and undid the screws that held the pelmet. They were old-style screws, a single groove across their heads. The hand that tightened them was probably dead.

The rail was glued to the floor. With a crowbar and a couple of gratifying blows of the hammer up it came. I laid the pelmet and the rail on the broken door in a pitiful heap. Nothing beside remained. Round the decay of that pathetic wreck the lone and level floor stretched far away. I had done well.

But a dunny needs a door. The doorway was framed, so a replacement door could be hung within its confines, a proper opening-and-closing door with hinges, handle, latch and lock. Once many years ago I tried to hang such a door from scratch.

I went at it for quite a while. Then I rang a man I knew who boasted to have been, at one stage of his life, the “premier door-hanger in all of south-west Otago”. He came to see what I had done. “Well now,” he said after a thorough assessment of the scene that occupied several seconds, “why don’t we start again?” By we he meant I.

So rather than hanging a door that hinged and latched, I decided to replace the sliding door with – and I am confident you’ll be impressed by my imagination here – a sliding door. It was the work of 30 seconds online to find there was such a thing as a sliding door kit, and the work of 30 minutes to drive to a hardware store that didn’t stock one. But its rival did. And then I bought a door.

There is a manly pleasure in striding into a door department and saying, “I want a door”. There should be more such simple statements in this life. We waste much time on fudging, imprecision and dishonesty.

And how simplicity resonates. It thrums like an oil drum, beaten. “I want a door”, a way in, a point of entry to a better world. O hardware store man, show me the little low door that leads to the garden of pleasure.

“What size?” said the doorman.

Life-size, I wanted to say. But I just handed him the measurements. The door cost $62. It seemed to me a bargain.

The sliding door kit consisted mainly of a rail to fix above the door from which the sliding door would hang. The only tools required to do the job were a spirit level, an electric drill and a third hand.

But up went the rail in the end quite well. Onto the door went a pair of wheeled plates. On to the rail slid the wheels. Into each end of the rail went a stop. And heigh-ho, the dunny had a door. I slid it to and fro. I felt a surge of pride. It wasn’t beautiful, but it would serve.

Until that is, the day when my successor in this house and garage curses and dismantles it, wondering, as he does so, who the dead man was that screwed the screws in all those years ago. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.