A quick note: This post is sponsored by 3-IN-ONE® Fast-Acting Penetrant, but you know I will always tell it like it is, so all words and opinions are entirely my own. Thanks for supporting the brands that support this blog.
This time of year is full of big projects. Whipping the garden into shape, never-ending weeding and, if you’re like me, just making more gardens. In the midst of all this busy-ness little things get pushed aside.
In this hideous before shot of our renovation (literally taken as we were moving out) you can see the cellar doors on the right. There’s no hiding those!
One of those little things is an annoying development with our cellar doors that lead to the basement from our patio. I have a love-hate relationship with these doors. I love that we have access to the basement from outside and I can’t tell you how much it comes in handy. But I hate that the doors are smack dab in the front of our house. There’s not a thing to be done about that, so we just paint them an innocuous color and avert our eyes.
Hard to open up the big cellar doors when the handles were rusted in this position.
The doors are big, heavy things that require a bit of heft to move. So when the handles seized up over winter, it made it even more difficult to open them. And this time of year we go in and out of them a lot, sometimes to just dump our muddy clothes by the washing machine before we go upstairs. Because the handles are stuck and therefore the doors are difficult to open, we end up leaving them open a lot. And that makes the whole situation on the patio even more ugly.
The other day I got completely sick of the situation. Most of the plants are now in the ground and the patio is starting to get cleaned up. We’d like to sit out there and enjoy summer a little. So when I reached to open the doors and had to jam my hand under the stuck handle for the millionth time this spring, I decided that all other projects had to wait until I fixed this.
I grabbed 3-IN-ONE® Fast-Acting Penetrant, which is designed to quickly loosen stuck parts and prevent rust, and put two or three drops down the tube where the handle fits in. Then I waited about a minute (OK, I was checking Instagram), and worked the handles back and forth a bit.
Two drops of 3-IN-ONE Fast-Acting Penetrant and a check of Instagram (to pass the time while waiting for it to do it’s thing) got this seized-up handle working again.
And guess what? They were released, moving smoothly in any position, meaning I could once again open the doors with my hand in the proper position and not throw out a critical body part trying to open those doors.
After the penetrant had a couple minutes to work I just worked the handles back and forth and it was like magic: unstuck!
Seriously that was it. I spent four months cursing something I fixed in two minutes and one Instagram check with three drops of 3-IN-ONE® Fast-Acting Penetrant. What in the world took me so long to check this off the list?
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I have never heard of this product. Thanks for sharing.