Doors for the Dummy RV Owner

RV replacement door

A friend of ours who's read a lot of professional papers over her career says that one of the things she always looks for in the bibliography is the quality of the sources. She's taken to heart the advice of an English Comp professor she had decades ago, who said that relying on "Reader's Digest" and The National Enquirer as sources would be... questionable. We say that the same holds true for online content, so when a staffer turned up a post at GoneOutdoors.com whose sole reference was a previous DotD winner, we knew we had a strong candidate. Let's give a Bronx cheer, then, for Anna Rose and her post, "How to Install an RV Door."

Rose's opus, which dates from 2012, has exactly one "reference": a post at Trails.com (another DMS¹ property) penned in 2009 by Kelsey Childress, herself a two-time DotD winner. Kelsey had no references, so who knows where the hell she got her "instructions." All we know is that Rose did nothing to improve them. In fact, she made them worse.

That's right, her four steps reduce to,

1. "Remove your old RV door and frame with either the socket wrench or screwdriver..."
2. "Apply putty tape to the outer edges of the exposed hole on your RV. "
3. "Attach your new door and frame with your socket wrench or screwdriver, "
4. "Remove any excess putty with the scraper to finish..."

That's all she wrote. She didn't even include Kelsey's mentions of the frame or of measuring the door to find out what size replacement to order (which step she slotted after "remove the old one." 

No, there's nothing about measuring the opening (beforehand, idjit), nothing about whether or not the frame can be replaced, nothing about the type of hinges, nothing about latches... in short, according to Anna (and Kelsey before her) all you do is "take out the old one, put in the new one."

Hell, if the job is that easy, why would anyone need to ask our Dumbass of the Day how to do it? Maybe they should have asked someone who'd actually done the job once or  twice...

¹ DMS was Demand Media Studios (now renamed Leaf Group), parent company of eHow. As we always like to say, you can't spell "dumbass" without "DMS"!

DDIY - DOORS