 The best kind of doors are the doors you have to explain. Welcome, welcome to Unhinged with the DoorDork. We're door hardware nerds and today some glazing nerds, glass nerds get together and we knock and we slam on different doorfills. We learn, we laugh, sometimes we even cry. Today we do have a very special guest, Alex Bouchel with learnglazing.com. No one Alex for, I don't know, a few years now or a couple of years now at least, but we've been like really close LinkedIn buddies. We've been chatting back and forth, original door, door following. So appreciate all the contribution to the channel and I'm really excited to have you on the show. Alex, why don't you say hello, hop on, tell us what you do and share a little fun fact about yourself. Okay, yeah, so my name is Alex Bouchel. I'm with learnglazing.com. We are a online education resource that is free for everyone. Knowledge is power, it's the key to the future. So why don't you tell us a little fun fact about yourself? Yeah, so there's something that a lot of people know about me or at least not on this side of the world and the glazing world is that I'm actually a licensed Star Wars artist. So I have been working with licensed properties for Star Wars since 2007, jumping on and on in a bunch of projects, mostly for like tops trading cards and small shows and posters and stuff. But recently in the last few years, I finally reached what I would say a lot of us think is a dream, which is to create some licensed properties for some limited edition posters for them that get showcased at some pretty cool shows. Comic book conventions dedicated to purely Star Wars people called Star Wars Celebration. And I've been invited to, or at least I've made it into a three of them right now, which was a pretty cool highlight in my career because now like my name is out there a little bit more. So anybody that's ever Googled me and they see drawings instead of learnglazing stuff, that's probably why they would be confused. I got my other side here too. That's amazing. You draw or is it all digital or what's your medium? I'm not a digital guy. I always wanted to be that way. But first of all, I do like the mess. I like the paints and the smells and all that horrible stuff that comes from some of those really terrible colors when you open the bottles. But at the same time, I like the idea that I get to hold it, right? At the end of the day, there's a product that I'm proud of. And as much as it gets scanned and reprinted, I always have the one of a kind, right? So for me, the original piece of art being on a thumb drive, isn't it super exciting? Obviously, there's a lot of things that you can do with digital art, especially nowadays that are incredible that I wish I could do with my art. I've always been jealous of the little undo button that I don't have, right? If I spray the wrong color, it's the wrong color now. And so I've had to restart a few paintings here and there. But no, everything. I've tried gouache in the past, not a huge fan. It's more finicky than I have the patience for. I did acrylic for the largest part of my, we'll say artistic career. And lately I've been really playing with watercolors because I just really love the texture and the flow and the fact that I'm less inclined to be more of a perfectionist with them and I can be more playful. So I feel like in an artistic way, it's more rewarding to me because I don't overthink things. I can just let it be what it wants to be. The old Bob Ross happy little accidents mentality. So. We could all use a little bit more of that attitude. Yeah. That's awesome. Alex, thanks for joining us. I'm happy to have you on the show. It's about time, right? Like it's about time. Seriously. Mia, do you want to say hello? Hop on and say hello. Yeah. So I'm so excited. Alex is here. He was like one of our early door hardware nerds also. So I know the Dorks were established first but we're a little glass nerdy here too. So we all coexist together. My fun fact is that I just got a new gadget. I got a freeze dryer and it can take a gummy bear that looks like this and turn it into a gummy bear that looks like this. And it's like a Cheeto. It's like a gummy bear Cheeto almost. It's crazy. Still sugary, right? It's still sugary. Still tastes exactly like a gummy bear but is that like Cheeto crunch? It sounds like it would be weird. It is and it's not. I don't know how to describe it. So we've been experimenting with all those different candies. Oh, so you're just throwing everything in there now at this point just to find out what happens. Yep. We've had dehydrated Skittles before. They are pretty good, pretty delicious. Had I known Benji, I would have brought one in to show you because we just, we did those. We threw like a whole batch of fruity candies in to just see what happened. Maybe I'll have a side channel for us of will it freeze dry? There you go. All right, Benji, what's your fun fact today? This is less of a fun fact but more of like a life update. We are under contract in buying a house which is in a neighborhood that we've been trying to get into. It's not too far away from all our community co-ops and all of that. It's been quite the process, quite the market especially here in Oregon. It's been insane fighting for houses but were expected to close hopefully by the end of this month. One of the first things I did obviously was check out the door hardware. The back door is gonna have to be replaced. It's not in good shape. So maybe we'll have to do some DIY door hardware nerds in the field videos or something like that watching me re-hang a door. We can critique your install. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because I only had a hookup to get some good hardware. Well, one of my first things I'm gonna do is I'm gonna re-key it. That's a good homeowner advice if you are buying a new home. One of the first things you need to do is re-key because you don't know where those keys are at. People get them copied all the time. There's a little helpful tip there. Got to use the codes in those garage openers too. Yes, yeah. Codes, even I've heard change the frequency of your detector. So if you actually have all the ones you're gonna be using and for most, a lot of the garage door closers like the one that I have, if you just reconnect them, almost like re-sync them, any piece of hardware that isn't present for that reconnection would lose the connection. So it's like, if you have three available and you want all those three to work and there was a fourth one out there, some of them will make the fourth one no longer work because it wasn't there during that time. Good tips there. Okay, so for those who don't know how Unhinge works, I will share my screen. We'll show three different door hardware fails. We'll go through each one. We'll react, we'll knock, we'll slam on it. I give it a knocking score, one through 10. One being not too knocking bad, but 10 being really bad. Let's get this taken care of. Let's call someone, let's write up a letter. Let's move forward. Today got some fun ones that are a little bit more glazing oriented towards you, Alex, in a more personality-wise as well. So you might, your worlds might be colliding here a little bit. I'm pretty sure you've seen this before, if not. I have not, actually. I haven't seen this before, okay. No, I have not. I love the wood frame on this. This is fantastic. You always see those stickers on the doors like this is not a door or you go around to the front entrance. I thought this was a very clever way to point that out. Yeah, I'm not sure. So is he pointing towards where the right door is or is he pointing at the other side? So yeah, he's pointing towards the correct door. Yeah, so. I hope so, yeah. I doubt Obi-Wan would mislead you in your quest. I have to say perfect no notes. Perfect no notes. It's a fantastic door. You wouldn't change a thing about it. Well, this is one of the ones where people would actually stop and read it, right? Cause I've seen so many door signs that nobody reads. You know, you got the classic push pull that people just slam into anyway that I happen to find hilarious. But I would have stopped and read this. It's eye catching. It's actually works. You know, my song is the best kind of doors are the doors you have to explain. I don't like that you have to explain to use the other door. That's not user friendly. There should be like maybe remove the hardware off of it. Like you remove the hardware off of it and like people know that you can't use that door, right? So there's user experience built into that. But I mean, overall, like I'm not complaining about how they're explaining this door. That's a very clever way to explain it. I do love to play on words at the bottom too. Yeah, please use the one. I don't know that people like removing hardware. I've seen a lot of people that complain about just having the holes or whatever damage may happen behind those handles. Or the cover plates don't look as good. Exactly. My other concern is most applications for something like this would be like a retail environment. Most retail environments don't have unused door space. This could potentially be an emergency exit. It's not that bad as long as they have it unlocked during business hours. So people could egress, but that's a deadbolt right there. That's a dead latch right there. So if they are open for business and that is locked so people don't use this door, there could be concerns if there isn't some way to egress freely on the other side. But that's probably like my only call out other than the wooden frame is kind of funny for a aluminum. Yeah, and you got like stuck on the outside, but you do have like a commercial door. So it's, I mean, this almost feels like extra parts at some Glazer's house. I took it home, it didn't fit. Yeah, I don't know. I don't think I've ever seen a commercial space that is built this way. Yeah. I mean, usually it's all some kind of aluminum frame with an aluminum storefront right? I wonder if they like sort of surface applied the wood. I mean, obviously we can't tell. But it's like just over like casing the frame. Yeah, but why would you want to put something that's not going to last on top of something that lasts forever? Aesthetics. People do all sorts of crazy decisions for aesthetics. Adding maintenance. I'm not a fan of paint at all. Paint is going to dry out in the sun, the wood's going to rise. Yeah, but I like the cleverness of it. Yeah, not too knocking bad. If you were to give it a knocking score, Alex, what do you think? I don't, I mean, I don't see anything particularly wrong with the door itself. So I don't know that I could knock it down too much. I think the vinyl adds to it. So the number, high number is bad, right? Yeah. So I don't know, I'd put it like maybe in the three range just because I don't love the combination of the store with the rest of it. Yeah, not too shabby. It could be some code violations, but we don't know for sure. Yeah, it's hard to tell from this side. I mean, it could be a comic book store or something, right? Like who knows something small? Yeah, they could just be controlling the flow, right? Like people could be just exiting from this one and they want another one, another entrance for folks to come in. There's a lot of hypotheticals here. From an installation standpoint, it looks good. And as long as they're using that devil in the right capacity, like when the store is closed, then it should be good, it should be a one. Yeah, yeah, not too knocking bad. Pivot is a little bit of expo, so I wonder if they're experiencing some... Sag? Sag. It's a little tighter up here, but I mean, usually if you can see it from a grainy photo, that's a problem. But the top looks pretty even, so it could be just the wood on the outside too, right? It could be the frame that's off, which another reason why would you have a wood and frame for a door. That's a part that's got me. Not too knocking bad. Should we jump on to the next one? If you want to be featured on a future episode of Unhinged, or if you have a photo to submit, you can email me at miaatdoorhardwarenerds.com.