The door of the cabinet under our bathroom sink was broken. Well, the Ives Push Latch on the door was broken. There’s no handle on the door. You push it in a fraction of an inch, the latch clicks, and a spring inside it pushes the door open. When you push it shut, it stays shut. Except that it wasn’t popping open when you pushed it because the spring was broken.
It’s easy to replace. The hard part about installing that latch is getting it in just the right place, because you’re only supposed to be able to push it in a tiny bit before it will pop out. Since there are holes there from the screws holding the broken latch on, all it was going to take was getting a new latch, taking the old one off, and putting the new one on. There are three of those latches in the bathroom, and I’ve replaced one sometime in the past.
I took the broken latch to National Lumber on my way to work to see if they had a replacement, because I thought I had once bought a replacement there. No soap. I guessed I’d have to try Home Depot.
Or maybe the Rockler catalog lists one — nope. If it did, I might as well buy two at once, because another will break sometime, and I’ll save on shipping and handling by having them on one order, besides having one when I need it.
Hmm — is it possible I was smart enough to have bought more than one the last time I needed a replacement? Stranger things have happened. I went to the cellar to paw through my
HARDWARE STASH.
You know the answer, or I wouldn’t be writing this. I had two spares; now, after replacing the broken one without taking half an evening going to Home Depot, still one spare.
The moral of the story is, hardware also lives in stashes. And it’s a good thing.