Sunday, November 20, 2011

Handy Dads are Awesome!

We stripped this bedroom door in early-March and had the unwelcome surprise that one of the edges had a really bad patch. We hired a woodworker friend to remove the old strip of wood and replace it with douglas fir, which he did. But unfortunately the bad edge had the mortices for the hinges, so we couldn't hang the door without some extra work. We asked our friend to rehang the door for us, but he didn't. So this door has literally been kicking around upstairs since spring. Recently, Jeff rounded up his chisels from storage so we finally had the tools to get this tiny project finished.

Sharon's father and stepmother, Lloyd and Maxine, were passing through Portland on their way back down to California and they dropped in for a very quick overnight visit. (They've already headed out this morning for the long drive.)

Taking advantage of her father's visit, Sharon enlisted help to get two small tasks checked off our list.

The sewing room door is finally rehung! Jeff and Lloyd chiselled out the mortises for the hinges and had to fiddle a bit with alignment, but Sharon can finally close the door on her sewing room! Jeff still needs to take a belt sander to the bottom of the door because it's a bit too long to open over the rug in the room, but we're real close on this one.

Sharon also took advantage of her father's locksmith background to get some help ordering new locks for exterior doors and for new doors added in the basement during the remodel. While she had visions of pretty Emtek craftsman-styled locks like these, the inability to find matching pieces that would fit our pre-drilled doors and the high cost discouraged us from ordering them.



(Apparently about 10 years ago, it was easy to find lots of fancy hand-made options, but lock manufacturers have obviously streamlined their production to reduce costs and it's now difficult to find nice hand-crafted options anymore. And they pretty much come in one or two sizes, which works fine for new doors. We're trying to retrofit 100-year old doors. Sigh.)

So, instead we bought these very boring, but high quality, Schlage locks.



We ordered them from handlesets.com and got them all for quite good prices, compared to even our local big box hardware stores. We'll report back later on how the order went. Since this is actually an affiliate website to the lighting website where we bought the exterior lights, we aren't expecting any problems.

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