The curious case of the door latch, or, is there anything a rotary tool won’t solve?

OK we’ve all been there. That interior door that doesn’t latch too reliably. In our case, on the master bath. When a house gets middle-aged it, like me, gets a little crooked (squish as they say out east) in places. And, this causes a set of shimming and trimming to cause things to come back into true (unsquish?).

So in my case, the master bath door springs open suddenly quite a bit. So i looked at it, thinking maybe i’ll just undo the catch-plate and add a shim on one side or the other. But, in my case, its now slightly too high. OK, I can take the door off the hinges and shim it a bit. But, no dice, that would mean redoing the trim, and, as you can see, down the rabbit hole I would go.

So, what do you do when you have a set of fancy door hardware with some fancy finish (brushed-brass-nickel-moon-surface?)? You whip out your ‘rotary tool’ (note I didn’t say dremel, that’s right, this is an off-brand ‘workforce’ tool. Still spins fast with no torque tho’). And once the tool is busted out, eye the variety of grinding and polishing heads, pick one that looks like it will leave most of that finish there while getting rid of a few pesky mm of metal.

And boom, a few sparks and grinding later (and the lovely smell of brushed-motor-ozone in the morning!), and we have a bathroom door that shuts. Take that cat!