Pretty door stuff

I somehow totally missed posting pictures of the gorgeous hinges doing their gorgeous thing!

<-- And look, they hold the door up too! The doorjambs are also very pretty, made from douglas fir, so when we finally get around to staining and sealing them they'll match the doors perfectly.

And in the meantime, we've got some knobs!

It's funny.. I was just getting used to having the deadbolts in place, so now after I unlock the door I keep pushing on it, expecting it to open, and thinking it must still be locked somehow. And then I finally remember to turn the knob and everything works just like it should. I must be tired, because I keep doing that..

<-- This is the unfinished, interior fire door. The reproduction privacy sets have a fake keyhole cut in them which I love! That little detail is why I bought the knobs from Nostalgic Warehouse instead of one of the dozen or so places online that carry similar hardware.

I was planning on drilling it out so you could actually see though the door, but I think I'm going to paint that spot black instead.. at least to start off with.. I can always drill a hole later if it looks weird.


Sorry for the lack of posting recently.. it's been a bunch of behind the scenes stuff and some non-house related work which I'll post some pix of soon

we're lousy with doors!

Just look at all the doors we have now!!
<--This one you can see from the street! You can also see the old, rotty door leaning against the house.. guess we'll have to something with that.. Anyone need a fine, antique door? it's cheap! ;) Still not much in the way of doorknobs.. but there's a functional lock, which opens with a key, on each and every external door we have! (not counting the piece of plywood covering the hole where there used to be a door.. any minute now there's going to be a wall there instead, so I'm counting that as wall, not door)

<-- This is the firedoor between the garage and the living space. We didn't have the space in our "clean room" to stain and seal it with the others, and since it was prehung because it needed special self-closing hinges we figured it'd be just as easy to finish it once it was up.

We have to finish all the jambs anyway, so there's about a million more coats of varnish in my future.

<-- And this is the firedoor between the living space and the garage.

It's the same door.. It's just so exciting I thought I'd show it from both sides :D

it takes one to.. get another one

Now that we've got one door, it seems like the others might be willing to go up too..

This is the door jamb for the back door. You can just kinda see the really fracking gorgeous hinges there..

One of the conditions Zach had for helping us with these doors was that we get them as slabs (not pre-hung) because that was where all the fun and challenge is!

Here is that piece and the rest of the jamb in place at the back doorway.

Notice the utter lack of plywood back there?? Any minute now there's also going to be a lock with a key instead of a sliding latch that we can only get to from the inside. Don't get me wrong, the plywood with latch was a vast improvement over the gaping hole, and is much better than a screwed-on inoperable piece of plywood.

The 2nd half of "fun and challenging," getting the door to swing freely and close all the way.

And the really fun part! A closed door!! With a lock on it, even. A lock that we have keys for!

The doorknob will come soon, and then it will be just like a real door!

There's way more light in that area now too. There aren't any windows back there, which is why we got the door with lights on top, and it makes a really big difference.

We still have to stain and seal the jamb, and there's the slight lack of siding there which will have to be addressed before we can trim the door out.. but I'm enjoying the fact that (have I mentioned this yet?) there's totally a door back there :D

Shut the door!

Exciting news at Chez Neumansky!! We have a bedroom door!!

Try to remain calm.. I know it's hard.
Let me walk you through this miraculous development:

We have a sort of alcove-y confluence of doorways between the hallway, kitchen, bedroom, and 'dining room.'

• The door to the dining room was walled off at some time in the distant past
• The door to the kitchen hasn't had a door on it since the moulding currently there was put in place.
• The bedroom, which HAD a door not too long ago, judging by the hinges, lost it to the abyss without a trace..
• Leaving a door we'd never closed between the hallway, and.. more of the hallway.

In retrospect, it's an obvious move.. but I had such hope that the actual door that started there would turn up!

The hinges had to be moved a little, and a side and bottom edge needed to be ground down so it would close. Our friend Zack has the magic touch with doors, and now it's like it's always been there!

It makes the hallway seem way bigger (and turned up a corner that hasn't seen much cleaning since the original bleach-scrubbing)! Our poor, deprived cats can't fight through the curtain anymore, and their race circuit through the house has a brand new major obstacle.. but now we have a room we can lock them into, as we'll definitely need to do more often as we get back to work.

We still have to get used to it, but I think we'll manage!

the Doors

Our doors are here!!!

The 6-8 week lead time turned into about 4 months.. first, it was impossible to get anyone to actually order them for us because we wanted 7" doors and that was apparently a difficult part number to find.

So Dan found the part number himself, and then it only took another couple weeks to get someone to actually place the order because apparently pricing was equally difficult to get. (The Simpson rep Dan talked to was interested to hear how challenging it was for us to buy his product.. )

Then, once the doors were ordered, it took another 10 weeks for them to show up. I called the day after they were due in and was told they'd be in the following week. ("great news! your doors will be here Wednesday!")



Thursday of the following week I called to find out if they were in and was told they'd be in next Tuesday in a similar happy, "great news!" tone of voice. (noticing a trend here??) We had one more go-around, but finally got the call that the doors had arrived!

<-- Apparently it was this guy right here causing the problem. It had arrived to the distributor all busted up, so the distributor held all the doors until Simpson was able to ship another one out. This is the only door we bought pre-hung, because we had to. It's the interior door between the garage/workshop, so it had to be 1 hour fire-rated, with self-closing hinges. Fancy, right? Heavy, too..

.. and really pretty!

<-- These are the 2 exterior doors for downstairs. We'll probably put some opaque film on the glass for the one at the front of the house, but we wanted to let more light into what is essentially a basement. We'll be staining these this weekend, and putting on a couple coats of marine spar varnish. Everyone seems to be surprised that we're not going to paint them.. but what's the point of having this beautiful wood if we're just going to slap a coat of paint on?! As it is, I've got a lot of work ahead to get all the years of white paint off the gorgeous molding in the rest of the house, I'm certainly not going to paint the one thing we have that's not already covered in it.

And we'll finally get to use the beautiful hinges!!
I got these from House of Antique Hardware in February! They're super-beefy, and so pretty!!

They don't match the hinges in the rest of the house exactly.. but the hinges in the rest of the house don't match each other anyway! I figure if the hinges and knobs on each floor match, no one will ever notice they're not the same as the ones on a different floor.

No one but me may notice the hinges at all anyway.. but I just have a thing for pretty hinges. Just look at how cool these are! And the feel super-solid!

Right. So.. it's not just hinges.. I've been plotting to get rid of the shiny brass knobs on the doors every since we had to install them to keep the evil grandkids out

These are from Nostalgic Warehouse, which makes some really nice reproduction hardware. Since we were getting new doors, I decided it would be much easier to deal with modern latches instead of mortising the doors.
I bought them from Shop4Classics online, because they had backplates with a fake keyhole cutout (I just LOVE that!!!)


And while I was at it, I picked up a matching handle for the front door. A "grand entry set," if you will.. this way I was able to get all the locks keyed alike.

I've been staring at this stuff for months, so it's very exciting to think that they'll finally be on doors! Plus, our super-classy plywood exterior will be replaced by actual doors that fill the entire doorway, and have actual doorknobs on them.

Serves no purpose whatsoever, except to make me smile!

I've been talking about doing this since we first moved in, but I finally found the Fairy Doors I was looking for! The lovely Henrietta is showing us the scale of the doors, which are covering the rat holes in the entryway baseboard.


As you can see, we have room for a whole block of doors to cover all the holes in this baseboard, but I didn't want to get too carried away ;)

Most of the doors I found online are wood (like the one at the end), but I like them a little more ornate, like these concrete ones.

These are intended to go outside, up against a tree.. the bottom of this last one isn't quite flat. Once we get our tools back from storage the door will spend some quality time with the grinder.