When one door closes, another door closes | Lisa Scottoline

I'm not leaving the house.

Because all the doors are stuck closed.

I'm not kidding.

I don't know if this is happening to you, but it is to me.

They say wood swells in bad weather, and it's been raining a lot.

Maybe that's what's been happening to my waistline. It's not carbohydrates, it's humidity.

Whatever the reason, I'm stuck home.

Normally, I wouldn't consider that bad news.

I'm that much of a homebody.

Plus, I've been on book tour, traveling to a different city every day, and as much as I love meeting my readers, I'm always happy to come home to the dogs.

But now we are hermetically sealed.

And I don't need to go out, but the dogs do.

Unless they can pee out the window.

The weird thing is it came on slowly, not all at once. It started last month, when I couldn't get out of my new garden room, but I finally got the door open after pushing, shoving, and profanity.

It was the profanity that did the trick.

Try it at home.

But then I couldn't close the door at night, which made me feel nervous and would also result in more rain falling on the top of the door, swelling it further.

So I bought a plane and tried to plane the door myself.

I thought, how hard could it be?

Answer: Hard.

It turned out that planing isn't plain.

I shaved the door with it still on, since I had no idea how to get the door off its hinges and didn't care enough to try.

And big curls of wood came off the side, like the biggest pencil sharpener ever.

So far, so good, but then I noticed the door was sticking in other places, so I kept planing away, and before you know it, the side of the door was looking wiggly, like when you cut your own bangs.

Or Dr. Seuss does.

So I called a carpenter, who did it correctly.

But then, after he left, the back door swelled closed, too.

I couldn't get the carpenter back, and I figured, let's see what happens when it dries.

But unfortunately, it never dried enough to open, and I had to go on book tour, so I left it closed that way.  And after I got home, it was still stuck closed.

And now my front door doesn't work, either.

So now I'm inside the house, as stuck as my doors.

And I'm waiting.

This is my usual approach to home repair.

Wait it out.

See if it fixes itself.

The best example of this is my downstairs toilet.

It runs if you don't jiggle the handle just right.

But it's temperamental. Someday it runs if you jiggle it too hard and other days it runs if you jiggle it too soft, like the Goldilocks of toilets.

I tried to fix it by taking off the lid of the tank and adding paper clips, safety pins, and eventually duct tape to attach the chain to the flapper.

Bottom line, I'm fishing inside my toilet tank once a week.

Half the time, I leave the lid on the floor beside the toilet, which is oh-so attractive.  And, of course, it's the toilet that gets the most use by me, the UPS guy, and FedEx Guy.

I have to give them complex jiggling instructions, so I finally gave up and called a plumber, who fixed it.  But it didn't stay fixed.

I was whining about this to my friend Laura who asked, "Why not just replace it?"

And I thought, "Why didn't I think of that?"

So now I have a new toilet.

I love it so much.

Now all I have to do is teach the dogs to use it.

Look for Lisa and Francesca's new humor collection, "I See Life Through Rosé-Colored Glasses," and Lisa's number-one best-selling domestic thriller, "After Anna" and her new Rosato & DiNunzio novel, "Feared," in stores now. lisa@scottoline.com.