The Key to Success

We’ve got our annual Cinco de Mayo party coming up this weekend. It was originally conceived of as a way to get us moving on the house—nothing like inviting 200 people over a month after you’ve moved in to really get those boxes unpacked. We’re using the party this year to finally get some locks on the bathroom doors. We have a Jack and Jill bathroom and last year we had an intricate system of post-it notes that seemed to work pretty well for everyone. Still, we thought it best not to tempt fate.

We had replaced the other doorknobs in the house with period-appropriate ones from Crown City Hardware out of Pasadena but this was a special case because we wanted locks, and that meant not just changing the doorknobs but the mortises as well.  (The old mortises were configured for key locks and besides being long gone, who uses a key to lock a bathroom door?)

This was a bear of a project but Jonathan enjoys the problem-solving it took. He had to remove the old mortises and not just replace them with the new ones, he also had to recut the door frame so the lock would throw.

Of course, he found that our old doors aren’t exactly straight so getting everything to match up took a little more time than he thought. On the upside, he got to use a new tool.

He also took one of the old mortises from the bathroom and replaced a busted one in the guest bedroom so now my closet will close without the help of a small river rock I kept by the door.

As soon as I touch up the paint on the trim, it’s one more one project checked off our list. I’ve said it before but the new doorknobs are make a world of difference in our house.