A Door For the Basement Cage
A Door For the Basement Cage

A Door For the Basement Cage

I know most people have doors & locks on their basement cages.  We never have.  When I moved into the condo back in 2012 the cage door was already leaning against the wall around the corner from the cage.  I never felt the need to put it back on.  Until now.  Two weeks ago our dear friends & neighbors Kathy & her daughter Morgan moved out.  Thankfully they only moved up the street.  The guy who owns the condo they rented for the past 10+ years is selling it, so they had to move.  Last week I went into our cage and noticed someone had been in there.  For decades I’ve kept all my little spare nails & bolts in a cylindrical Tupperware container.  The container is something my mom used to fill with congo bars [blond brownies] whenever I had girl scouts, or my brother had boy scouts.  It’s been with me since the 70s!  Last week I noticed someone had taken that little Tupperware, dumped my stuff out into a Home Depot container, and took off with it.  All that’s left is the top:

the house painter dumped this out of my antique tupperware        the house painter stole my tupperware so i locked the basement cage

WTMF’ingH.  I’m not going to spell that out.  I’m seriously bummed.  Yeah, obviously it’s not a huge deal, but I never thought I’d be without my little container.  I keep checking the cage every day hoping someone returned it, but so far, no.  My best guess is the painters or carpenters hired to fix up the vacant condo needed something and it was “just the perfect size” so they “borrowed” it.  So mad.  I haven’t mentioned anything to the condo owner, I don’t think there’s much point.  It either comes back, or it doesn’t.

So today I put the cage door back on our cage.  So sad.  I noticed very fast that I couldn’t just reattach it using the original hinge holes – it literally looks like it was ripped from it’s hinges.  I asked hubby and he remembers when he moved in the cage door was kind of hanging off all askew so he removed it.  Here’s pics of the hinge holes on the door, top and bottom.  The wood is very damaged:

damage to the basement cage door frame where hinges used to be        damage to the basement cage door frame where hinges used to be

I removed the little doohickey the padlock goes through:

the other side of the basement cage door had no damage

So I could flip the door around and reattach the hinges on the fresh side.  The hinges were still attached to the door frame:

basement cage door hinge        basement cage door hinge

I placed a little piece of wood on the bottom of the door frame & balanced the door on it:

i used a block of wood to position the basement cage door        i used a block of wood to position the basement cage door

Then marked where the new hinge holes needed to be, pre-drilled some holes, and reattached them:

marking the basement cage door frame for hinges        attaching hinges to the basement cage door

When I held up the doohickey to line up with the existing catch, I realized it needed to be lowered or it wouldn’t fit.  So I removed the catch, lowered it and screwed in the doohickey:

i had to remove and re-align the latch on the basement cage door        i had to remove and re-align the latch on the basement cage door

For now the cage is locked with a zip-tie until I can either find my padlock or buy a replacement:

i used a zip tie to secure our basement cage door before getting a lock        basement cage door has been officially re-attached

I will leave the cage door locked until the construction is done on the other condo and the new owners have bought it and moved in and I can determine if they’re trustworthy.  Since we are going to have new owners I decided to also make labels for the 3 cages and 2 auxiliary storage areas in the basement.  We are #63:

i labelled the basement cages & auxiliary storage areas        basement cage door has been officially re-attached

The other large condo [the one that will be up for sale] is #61, and the studio condo is #59:

i labelled the basement cages & auxiliary storage areas        i labelled the basement cages & auxiliary storage areas

#61 has the biggest cage, so 5 years ago I cleaned out and commandeered a shelving area in the basement as our auxiliary storage:

i labelled the basement cages & auxiliary storage areas

And the studio condo gets the other auxiliary storage area:

i labelled the basement cages & auxiliary storage areas

After that was done I cut up about 100 boxes and bundled them up for recycle day:

i cut up a lot of boxes in my quest to clean up the basement

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4 Comments

  1. Aww, crap! This goes to show that even the most ordinary looking things can have special meaning to their owners! So sorry you lost your container. Locking up your belongings is a good idea, but I’m sorry this had to be the reason.

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