Hi again everyone. I ran across a couple of quick things I wanted to share. Not really part of a larger subject but each one a little fun. For starters, a door and a lock.

As we work towards final touches in the kitchen, we still have the door leaving the kitchen and going into the dining room. This door we originally decided to continue with the antique white paint but once we stripped the paint down, as it was there by the old now exposed brick and radiator pipes, in the oldest part of the kitchen and next to the plaster walls…again, we were led with “nope, that’s not what it needs. Plan change!”

I’m telling you, if you work thoughtfully enough, looking around at what was, the house reveals how it should be. We are so lucky! If we had hired a contractor (which was part of our original plan – not all of the work but a good portion of it), we would have given our instructions, left the house for the day and they would have done the work. Any contractor would have done a great job, I’m sure, but they would have been stuck to whatever we’d told them before we truly saw things.

No judgement at all to anyone who does this. There are absolutely times when this is needed and normally we would not have had the time ourselves not so long ago, plus not every house calls for a special touch. I think one that’s had such a different history, so many stories of those who lived here, each one changing it slightly needed a unique touch. We consider ourselves blessed to get to try and help it. Stripping the wood, touching it up close, seeing the grain, we decided we couldn’t paint this one. We had to stain this door trim. And this way, with the door open you can see into the dining room and the beautifully stained floors and china cabinet so it makes a wonderful transition. We love it! We’ll keep touching it up, then a few coats of poly and we’re set!

On this door to the dining room was the old style locks. This type of lock is all over the house, on almost every door. Each one painted over and over, most no longer working and many missing door knobs. Luckily the dining room lock not only had a door knob but it was a pretty glass one.

By now I know how to restore old hardware. As you recall I had restored the old lock on the what we call the “water closet” (the hot water heater closet behind the kitchen). Therefore I knew with a little effort, I could restore this one and not only clean it up, but pretty certain I could make it work again.

After 2 multi hour crock pot soakings (very smelly btw and don’t worry, if you ever come to dinner, this was not my good crockpot! lol). A good scrub in between each time, then a final crock pot soaking with lineseed oil to get a nice patina…and….see below!

And check out the closeup image. After the globs of paint are gone, you can see inscription, which reads “Pat’d July 21, 1863.” I know this was made after that but still…how cool! And look at the beautiful scroll patterns on this lock and its corners! You can see remnants of this, on the locks all around the house, painted and globbed over. They are sooo pretty.

Now I would need to take it apart, dry it out, clean each inside part and see if I could get it working again. One I opened it up, thankfully, before I touched anything, I took several pictures of the inside to know how to put it all back together. This thing had more parts than I realized inside!

After carefully removing and drying each part, a good cleaning on the inside, some WD-40, a little brasso on the locks, all the parts went back in and the mechanism worked! (They don’t make ’em like they used to… 😉

With all of these old locks, a little elbow grease, a little time in a crock pot…and the beauty of what they once were returns! I just love restoring things like this on the house. Things that appear ugly now are only because of age, time constraints of the day, multiple paint jobs and what almost appeared as trash is now…

I’m still trying to decide what color to paint it. Maybe a copper color? Or satin nickel?