Screen Door Hinges, the Dummies Version

Pretty sure that's not Emily...

The nice people at Leaf Group have been laboriously moving old eHow.com content into niche sites, we assume the better to suck eyeballs at search engines. Sadly, it seems to work: quite often we see decade-old garbage content filled with errors at the top of the results when we Google (or Bing, etc.) a how-to question. They even seem to be replacing some of the more crapalicious content, as evidenced by all the red-letter entries on our DotD by name page. Sometimes, however, the replacement is just as bogus as the original, such as Homesteady.com post "How to Install a Spring-Loaded Hinge on a Screen Door" from the keyboard of Emily Patterson.

Patterson's been here before, and one of her other awards was for ignorance of screen doors; so it came as no surprise to our staffer that this question wasn't in her wheelhouse either. All he needed to do was to look at Emily's references to find a link to a primer on installing hinges on cabinets and doors that, when he checked it, only mentioned spring-loaded hinges in passing. Clearly, however, Emily attempted to simply reword an article from another DIY website, reference to which was verboten by eHow.com standards. Sadly, she did a lousy job of even that.
We think Patterson did a lousy job because...

• She told her readers to mortise the hinges into the edge of door! Errr, Emily, hinges like these are usually surface-mounted... but we've already established elsewhere that you'd never seen a wooden screen door.
• She described using a chisel by saying: "Place the edge of the chisel on the edge of the door with the curved side of the chisel facing in..." but we've never seen a chisel with a "curved" side. We think she might have meant "beveled."
• Emily advised newbies to "Tape the edge of the chisel with the hammer to remove all of the little sections of wood..." although she probably meant to tap the chisel – still, we strongly suggest not dulling the edge by tapping it with a hammer...

When all is said and done, Patterson gave us DIY instructions written by someone who had so little knowledge of the task that she provided instructions for an entirely different type of hings, and botched those instructions as well. Is it any wonder that Emily is now the proud owner of three Dumbass of the Day awards? We think not...

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