There are two doorknobs in the house that are not quite making the cut these days. The bathroom doorknob usually behaves, but every once in a while, it falls off and locks in a guest (or one of us). The door to the front bedroom is totally broken. You have to use pliers to open it because the doorknob falls off every time. It’s been getting old the last couple of weeks, and despite half a dozen attempts to fix the knobs, Seth has been unsuccessful. So, I embarked on an adventure to buy new doorknobs. This sounds like a relatively easy feat, but of course, as is common in any DIY endeavor, doorknobs are more complicated than I thought. So first, a list of terms you’ll encounter when buying doorknobs:
- Dummy– This is a doorknob that is totally non-functional (yes I am serious, and yes this is a real product that people buy). They are usually used for decoration or for doors that don’t need to latch for some reason (like a closet door or one of two double doors since only one of the two doors would need a latching mechanism).
- Half Dummy– This is a doorknob that is only half non-functional. One side of the knob functions normally but the other knob is only for decoration and does nothing. These are pretty much only used for closets. You want them to latch closed but they don’t need to be opened from the inside ever (you hope). Great for keeping closet monsters at bay and for locking in playing children on accident.
- Passage– This is a regular interior doorknob. It works from both sides and has a latching mechanism but no lock.
- Privacy– This is also an interior doorknob, but it has a built in lock, usually a push button or similar lock. This is the type of doorknob you’d use on a bathroom door or maybe an adult bedroom.
- Keyed Entry– This is a doorknob that locks using a key (duh).
- Backplate– This is basically the cover for the hole in your door where the doorknob goes. They can be a small circle behind your doorknob or they can be larger and more ornate like the ones in our house (shown in the picture above).
- Rosette– This is the word for the backplate of your doorknob if it is a circle (or similarly small). They may be plain or ornate, but they are not much larger than the knob itself.
- Mortise– This is the word for those cool old backplates that have keyholes with functioning locks. Back in the day, they would have opened with skeleton keys that are likely MIA if you actually happen to have cool old doors with these locks in the first place. We have these in our house and you can sort of see it in the picture below.
Now that we have doorknob terminology out of the way, I’ll explain to you my predicament. We like the look of our old, ornate doorknobs. They’re art deco style and we believe they’re original to the house since that style was popular in the 1940s when our house was built. Obviously that’s awesome and we want to keep them if at all humanly possible, but with Seth unable to fix the two broken knobs, it seemed like it was time to replace them (all 11 of them!). Because our backplates had functional mortise locks, there are holes in the hollow core doors about 3 inches lower than the actual knob. That ruled out a rosette backplate because it wouldn’t cover the hole in the door. The holes would be almost impossible to repair since you can’t exactly mud a hole in a hollow door. But when I looked into buying knobs with backplates similar to our old ones? Holy crap are they expensive! Like $175 per door expensive! Factoring in our eleven doors, that comes out to $2000 for doorknobs! And while I love the look of those old style backplates, I am not really at a place in my financial life where I can afford to spend that kind of dough on doorknobs.
So my next option was replacing the hollow core doors and buying much cheaper rosette knobs to go with them (and hanging hardware, which is pretty cheap if you buy a contractor package at the hardware store). We also have the original doors from our house which have this great single-panel inset design that I really love. That said, some of the detail work has gotten pretty banged up over the years, so replacing them isn’t the worst ideal I’ve ever had. After browsing for a while at Home Depot, I found some doors that still had some interesting details in the range of $40-65 each and some pretty plain rosette doorknobs in the bronze finish I had been eyeing for $10-15 each. That’s way better, but still in the range of $550 to $900, which is more than I’d like to spend to remedy two broken doorknobs.
Lucky for me, a very helpful employee of the Home Depot (whose name I woefully forgot to ask for in my ensuing excitement) saw me frowning at doorknobs and asked if he could help. I almost turned him away, but for some reason I blurted out my entire predicament instead, mortise lock door holes and my love for my old doors and all. And he said the best thing ever: “I have replacement knobs for those.” BINGO! Each package comes with two knobs and a new spindle, which is a metal bar that is threaded on either end to attach the knobs. The spindle is the part of our knobs that is totally irreparable. Success! For $21 out the door! I could have hugged the poor man. And when he pointed out that he also has skeleton keys for the mortise locks I nearly started dancing with him. I didn’t get one (yet) because I like to enjoy one little victory at a time, but you can bet I’ll be back for one and those mortise locks will be functioning again before too long!
What old details does your home have that you hope you never have to part with? Tell us about them in the comments section below!