Before dashifying our front door with a bit of paint, I was anxious to update our door handle and lock. Unfortunately, one of the bummers of owning an older home is that often our hardware is a strange size—as in, what was standard back in 1947 is no longer…standard. After quickly nixing the purchase of a brand new door and much searching for a door handle that would fit our current door—nope, nada, not even online—we opted to work with the original handle while adding a new deadbolt lock. This is the worst best picture I have of the original door handle set—yeah, the one squeezed into the left side of the photo.
Note: Do not buy a door handle from Home Depot over a year before you plan to install it…only to find that when you do try to install it, it’s the wrong size. And you’ve already taken it out of the packaging and thrown away the box. Don’t ask where our heads were at that moment well over a year ago. This is where we give Home Depot HUGE props, because when we dragged ourselves back to the store to return the hardware—heads hung low with shame—they took everything back without batting an eye, since they still had the same piece in stock—and told us it happens all the time! Oh, the life lessons learned in the DIY process.
Let’s start with the lock. Our old lock was not exactly bombproof. You could actually turn the lock for the deadbolt before closing the door and then pull the door shut on your way out. Not. safe. at. all. Thankfully, we live in a great neighborhood, so we didn’t lose too much sleep over it, but still. So recently Matt took a good chunk out of his Saturday to deal with this rebellious lock of ours. Once again, because of our un-standard original lock, we had to go the complicated route of drilling a larger hole in our door and adding depth to the deadbolt hole in order to install a new lock that would actually hold against some force. To spare you hours of painful detail—yes, that’s how long this took—we ended up buying a hole saw and drilling into our wood door to make room for our new lock (talk about nerve-wracking). Sadly, we didn’t realize we needed to drill about halfway and then switch the saw to the other side of the door, so we drilled all the way through from one side…and the wood on the front of the door splintered. It was somewhat traumatic, but this story ends well.
Matt finished installing the new lock and then applied DAP wood filler to the splintered section (it was about six inches long, but we were able to refit the splintered pieces back into the door and putty over it with the wood filler).
The wood filler worked beautifully and after several coats and some light sanding, it was hardly noticeable, plus we knew were going to paint over it. And yes, I totally should have taken pictures, but things were pretty hairy for awhile, so snapping photos wasn’t exactly on the brain. Clearly this isn’t my day job.
The next dilemma was figuring out how to match our new lock with our original door handle. Since I'm a huge believer in spray paint, and since I’ve actually seen several other bloggers paint their door hardware recently, I felt we had nothing to lose by giving our handle several coats of Rustoleum’s oil rubbed bronze spray paint to match the oil rubbed bronze lock we had just installed.
It worked like a charm! Virtually no one would be able to tell the difference if I wasn’t announcing it to the world via the web (although some of you might be thinking that the difference in texture is pretty obvious, but we hardly even notice it, and it definitely doesn’t detract from the look of the door).
It definitely looks more cohesive than the old black chippy handle, and we feel way better about the safeness of our house having a lock that actually works.
Ahh…one of the joys of updating things is that it always makes something else look dingy…like our railings. They are quite the eyesore and not even close to safe, considering they are completely rusted out at the bottom, but they’re just going to have to wait.
When I get hung up on minor details like railings, It’s helpful for me to go back to the beginning…
Oh, how easy it is to forget the great strides that have been made—which is also a good reminder to count your blessings!
What do y’all do when you realize something isn’t a standard size in your house? Do you drop bucko bucks buying custom made items, or do you turn to spray paint to solve all your problems? Have you stopped to count your blessings lately?
