I Suck At Installing A Garage Door Opener

Today has been a good day.

With this being the week of Karen's birthday, we decided to celebrate with dinner at one of our favorite restaurants: Not Your Average Joe's located in Norwell. Today was the only feasible night to go out for dinner as we both have plans for the remainder of the week. Karen even has plans of a non-birthday nature on the actual day of her birthday. So today it was.

Needless to say, Not Your Average Joe's was delicious. We both had the specials: Karen had the cranberry-teriyaki chicken with butternut squash cannellonis; I had the grilled pork tenderloin drizzled with a cider mustard sauce and served with sweet potato hash and spinach. (Cue Rachael Ray's "Yum-O" sound.) Dinner was very good. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

The waitress even brought a sample of the ahi tuna wonton for us. I guess the Not Your Average Joe's location occasionally provides patrons with samples of their food throughout the week and today happened to be the ahi tuna wonton. (For anyone curious, the wonton was good... which probably comes as no surprise.)

Karen and I even had dessert at Not Your Average Joe's, which was a rarity. Usually, whenever Karen and I dine out, we end too full from the meal to have any dessert. But today, we left enough room for chocolate chunk pecan pie which was also on the special menu.

All in all, the entire meal was fabulous. Karen enjoyed it as well, which is good since it was for her birthday.

Following dinner, I got to work on a home improvement project that seems to have been around for quite some time: installing a garage door opener. Now, I suck at installing a garage door opener. Of course, this garage door opener should not be confused with the other garage door opener that I installed not too long ago. This garage door opener was for the other bay within the garage.

For anyone curious, Karen and I purchased our home over seven years ago. The house has a two car garage. Only one of the garage doors had an opener installed. Granted, the opener was ancient and loud, but it worked. Our intent when we purchased the house was, among the huge list of other home improvement projects, to install a garage door opener for the second bay.

Unfortunately, the second bay of the garage remained without an opener for quite some time... until now. We had removed the original garage door opener from the other bay a while ago. So for some time, neither of the doors had a garage door opener even though I had purchased a couple of openers a few years ago.

The garage door openers had simply remained in the garage collecting dust for several years. Needless to say, I recently became motivated enough to install one of the garage door openers where the original garage door opener for one of the bays was located. That was the easy part.

The hard part was installing the second garage door opener because the second bay was not set up to have one. Anyway, I spent a good number of days installing studs (like myself... Just kidding) into the walls, applying joint compound, sanding, painting, etc. just to get the garage bay ready for the installation of the garage door opener.

Everything was wired up and ready to go yesterday. All I had to do after dinner was to drill a couple of holes into the garage door and attach the door to the trolley arm. Needless to say, I was giddy with anticipation last night because I was so close to finally being able to cross off a project from my "to-do" list that has been there for several years.

Anyway, I drilled the holes and attached the door to the garage door opener. And now, our second bay has a functioning garage door opener! I am so excited. I must have clicked the button to open the garage door so many times... just so that I could watch the door slide up and down. Yes, I get amused easily.

It was a good day. And now, I can focus on the other major renovation that has been sitting idle for a while: our first floor bathroom. Ugh!