Overwhelmingly, other people (and I) liked the dark bronze knob the best. So, I guess we'll go with that and cross the other bridges of possibly changing hinges and door locks later on if it seems necessary. I picked up knobs for the other three non-locking doors on the left of that hallway, the ones for the linen closet, the laundry room, and my bedroom.
I started out with the linen closet, which is kind of a janky door to begin with. I'm 99% sure that the previous owners did some DIY of their own with this door, and so it's basically a piece of wood with a doorknob in it. It's functional enough, but it's not fancy, and the carpentry leaves a lot to be desired. This was demonstrated clearly when I tried to put on the new faceplate (the part that goes on the edge of the door where the latch closes). The little opening that was carved there for the faceplate to sit in wasn't quite big enough. This had happened with the other door I had done, but it wasn't a big deal because the other doors were made by real people or machines, and not by some little DIY elf, so there was enough room in the opening between the door and the door frame to accommodate that. Not so with this one.
So I googled around for what to do about this, and the internet's consensus seemed to be that you could fix this yourself, literally by chiseling out a larger opening. Seriously. Well, I take that back - they said you could either chisel it out or use a saw of some sort to open it wider. But I don't have any power tools (yet), so chiseling it is! Because I was too cheap to actually go buy a chisel, I took my flathead screwdriver, placed it where I wanted to chisel parts away, and pounded on the end of it with my hammer.
This was not elegant work, but it was effective. After doing this for a little while, I had opened it up enough that the faceplate could now fit in the door frame, so I installed the rest of the knob.
I realize that close-up this doesn't look great, but it's really not something anyone would ever notice unless you were really staring at it.
So, that problem solved, I moved on to the second door, which went off without a hitch.
Here's a pic of what the two finished doors look like across from the remaining satin nickel door, which goes to the back stairs. So far I'm not super-bothered by the different finishes, but we'll see how it goes after a week or two.
Everything was going swimmingly, and then I got to the third door, which had looked the same as the other two on first glance, but which I now realized was actually different. (Jeez - I've realized that the previous owners had installed not 1, 2 or 3, but FOUR - count 'em, FOUR - different types of doorknobs on the doors on the main hallway. Okay, whatever, deep breath.) At any rate, this door was different. While the other ones were easy to remove, having two obvious screws that held the knobs onto the door, these had no such thing. Here's a picture of one side of the door, which has a lock on the inside (because it's the bedroom):
No screws there...let's try the other side.
Now, you'd think that thing underneath the knob contains a screw, right? And it would seem logical, except that I stuck a bunch of stuff in there, and there was absolutely nothing in there. Nothing that I could even push against to help pry things off! I twisted the knobs, I pulled the knobs, I even tried to use my screwdriver as a crowbar to get them off, but I came up completely empty. I googled "how to remove doorknob without screws" and they basically described everything I had already tried, so I went for the nuclear option: I emailed my male friends. One of them did indeed have a suggestion that turned out to be right (which was to twist on the side with the lock to see if it was a cover for the screws hidden behind it), but for whatever reason I couldn't get it to work until the spectacular Miss Jackie Nelson came over and gave it a whirl. Success!
So I immediately got out my screwdriver and started replacing the knob so I could finally have my matching doorknobs. Only to run into this.
The flipping door wouldn't close! The faceplate on the door stuck out just a smidge too far from the door, which didn't allow it to fit in between the door and the strikeplate (the matching latch part on the door frame). Once again, there was an issue with that carved-out hole that the faceplate sits in. In this case, it was the right shape, as you can see here:
So that was fine, but it just wasn't carved deep enough in the door for the faceplate to sit flush. The problem is that the new faceplate sticks out just a smidge farther than the old one. In this picture below, the new one's on the left.
So here I was, back to square one.
Once again, I consulted with the men to find out if any of them had an appropriate power tool to deal with this and make the faceplate hole deeper. (For some reason it did not occur to me that the solution to making it deeper would be the same solution (chiseling) as I had found for the problem of changing the shape with the previous door.) But the boys knew: they unanimously agreed it was chisel time once again. I got away with using the flathead screwdriver the first time, but since this was a bigger job I decided to go ahead and buy a chisel.
There was frustration and even some blood, but I eventually got it.
I can't get a shot of that hallway that shows all the doors together, but here's what this one looks like now on its own:
Cute, right? I'm a fan. This color makes it look so much more intentional and less like a hotel. I was on kind of a roll, so I decided to do the closet doors that are in my living room too.
So you'll see from the pic above that I still haven't gotten around to dealing with the doors that open to the outside, because I'll have to figure out what to do about the locks. But I'm settled on going down this road, so someday soon you should see them all be the same color. Hinges too!
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