The Evan Incident

Recently I had a little bit of an incident in my house that necessitated some further improvements to the hallway.  Don't worry, no one got hurt - but there was definitely some discomfort involved.  With that set-up, let's go back in time to about a year ago when I discovered that somehow the doorknob on the inside of my downstairs bathroom had stopped working.

I have no idea how it happened, or exactly when, but people who came over started accidentally locking themselves in my bathroom, which was (it goes without saying) fairly awkward.  So I'd think to myself, "Man, I should really do something about that"... and then promptly forget all about it.  As a single dweller, I never shut that door, so it would only ever occur to me when someone else was in the house.  I'd warn them about the door, and give them the option of using the upstairs bathroom, or using the downstairs bathroom but not shutting the door all the way.  It was obviously a little weird, but somehow it just kept on not rising to the level of a Major Priority.

Until now. 

My friends Andrew and Evan were staying with me for a night before heading down to our college reunion.  We went out, had a few drinks, I gave them my usual spiel about their bathroom options, and then we all went to bed.  At some point in the night, Evan got up and - forgetting about my warning in his half-asleep haze - went to the downstairs bathroom, shut the door, and locked himself in.  

Or at least that's how I would react to being locked in a small, windowless room in the middle of the night.  Evan's a pretty laid-back guy, so he thought instead of "bothering" someone (his words), he would just lay down and go to sleep.  On the cold tile floor.  He admitted that he thought someone else would come along after not too long to let him out, but he did not reckon with my iron-clad bladder, unfortunately. 

So when I woke up in the morning, I saw the bathroom door closed, and not thinking too much about it in my own half-asleep haze, I opened it.  The door bumped into something, the lights were out, and I heard someone make some kind of noise.  So that's how I finally freed Evan, and that's when the whole sad story came out.  He didn't even use the towel for a pillow!  So now that I've confessed what a terrible host I am, I decided the time had finally come (and gone) to do something about the door so that this horrible incident would never be repeated.

All of the doorknobs in that hallway are the same kind of white enamel design, except for the door to the back stairs, which is in a satin nickel finish.  Pretty much all of the hardware in my house is in this same finish, so it's pretty tempting to just replace the white enamel knobs with something like the satin nickel and be done with it.  But there's something about having that finish absolutely everywhere in the house that just feels a little weird and bland to me, like I'm in a reasonably-priced hotel.  Not a cheap motel, because they actually do look quite nice - but just a place lacking in personality, if that makes any sense.

The issue is that changing all of those knobs (and then possibly more of the other hardware) is a pretty big commitment that I'm not sure I'm quite ready for.  And if you have half of the doorknobs in some other finish, and half in the satin nickel, does that look even weirder than if you had just gone all in with one of them?  And if you make the wrong decision, that's pretty expensive, because each one of these doorknob sets could cost as much as $30 (and waaaaaaaaay more than that if you get crazy with it).  And I've got 8 doors to deal with on the first floor, so that would be an expensive mistake. 

I was agonizing over this when my mom suggested that I basically just do a little experiment, rather than making the decision right now.  Good idea!  I figured I could talk myself into getting past the possible waste of $20ish bucks if it was in the name of getting the right thing later.  One of the options that I was most interested in was a dark oil-rubbed bronze kind of color.  I had used something like that when I redid the bookcase, and I liked how that turned out. 

The think this high-contrast look manages to look traditional enough that it fits in my 1870-something house, but adds just a little more sharpness that looks modern.  So maybe it would look just as nice with the doors in the hallway, where all the trim, doors, and floor are white.  I decided to pick up a doorknob in this dark finish to use for my experiment (rather than a satin nickel one), because I felt pretty confident that nothing BAD would come of having all the knobs in the satin nickel.  It might be a little boring, but that's about the worst thing I could say about it - I actually really like the satin nickel for a lot of the hardware that I have, so I'd be perfectly happy to revert to that if the experiment went badly.

So here's the new doorknob kit, and the tools for the job. 

The whole thing was pretty simple, and I learned some new doorknob-words.  Like did you know this thing that goes in the middle of the lock is called a pawl?

Nothing much to see here process-wise except for the finished product, which now looks like this. 

And the best news yet - it's functional!  I wanted to try it out, and I almost did my experiment from inside the bathroom, before having a horrible flashback to The Evan Incident and deciding I wouldn't press my luck with that until someone else was here to let me out.  But I did try it from the outside, and everything worked great.

So now the question is, which finish to use for the remaining doors.  Here's a few shots where you can see the range of finishes that are now next to each other in the hallway, so there's a pretty good side-by-side comparison to think about.

If there was nothing besides aesthetics to think about, I think I would go with the dark bronze finish.  Compared to the other ones, I just think it looks way more interesting since there's SO MUCH white everywhere in the hallway.  It's just a nice little accent.  But if I think matching is important (and I confess I think I do, at least when they're right next to each other like this), that would mean not only redoing the closet and bedroom doors, but also the keyed entry door.  So then you get into the issues with my house keys - would I have to get new locks, new keys, and new spare sets of keys?  And let's not even talk about the hinges.  That seems like a lot of unnecessary work just to have some pretty doorknobs. 

Well, who can say where this will end up, but I will probably think about it for a little while before doing anything.  If anyone has any ideas or strong preferences, I'd love to hear them!  I'm also still searching for a new hallway light, and thinking about how that might play into this, so I'm sure this is not the last that you will hear about the hallway.