It takes a village to replace my door hinges

Over the past couple of weeks I've been slowly working on the remainder of my door hardware makeover.  I had finished up all the interior doorknobs, but I still needed to replace the exterior doorknobs and deadbolts and all of the hinges.

First issue with both of these things was just assembling all of the hardware.  The exterior doorknob and deadbolt sets were $50 each (for a pretty run of the mill set from Home Depot, so I can only imagine what others must cost).  $100 for doorknobs for two doors?!?!  It took me a while to just feel comfortable spending that, so that's why they didn't get done earlier.

As far as the hinges, those took a fair amount of work just to figure out what I needed to buy.  As it turns out, there are a million different shapes and sizes of door hinges, so I had to carefully measure mine (and then bring pictures with me to the store) in order to make sure I was buying replacement hinges that would even fit on my doors.  That all worked fine for the interior doors - here are all the hinges for those 9 doors.

The ones on the left are a slightly different size and shape than the ones on the right, because (wouldn't you know) the doors of one of the closets were cut in a slightly different way than the other ones.  Then I actually had to special order the bigger hinges for the exterior doors because they were so unusually shaped...sheesh.  Anyway, I finally got all this stuff assembled, but needed some help.  So obviously I called up the Lady Homeowner's Co-Op.

This group is the brainchild of my friend Phoebe, who realized that we knew several gals that all own houses.  The problem is that we all live solo, so we might occasionally need an extra set of hands to help with doing some of the work on the house.  We also figured we could pool the various tools and expertise we might have.  So Project Door Hinge became our first "meeting," since I needed some help with hanging the doors.

For our first effort, I'd call it a smashing success.  We worked in pairs, with one person screwing and unscrewing hinges, and the other person holding the door in place.  Here's Phoebe and Monica making it look easy. 

And here's Shannon using her special tool like a boss.

It took us a couple hours with 4 of us working on it, so I can only imagine how long it would have taken without them.  Thank you ladies of the Co-Op!  Things started to look pretty good after that.  9 of the 11 doors now had both their knobs and hinges.  Here's the final before and after of the upstairs bathroom:

On the main floor, as you'll recall, I was still waiting on some deliveries and cash flow to take care of the exterior doorknobs and hinges.  It took me a few weeks, but once I finally assembled all of the materials, I still needed to find a victim helper to help me take off the doors and hold them while I re-hung them.  Luckily, I was able to talk yet another friend (thank you Brian!) into helping out with that in return for some free beer.  I'm lucky I have so many people willing to give up their time to help me with my nonsense.  Especially for this thing, because it was (of course) more complicated than we initially thought.

The exterior hinges were trickier because they were spring hinges, meaning they also had to be tightened once they were hung in order to make them sort of snap back after being opened.  And installing the deadbolts themselves proved to be slightly annoying because everything has to line up just so in order for it to close properly.  But I won't dwell on that because it's not very interesting - the point is, it took another 4 or so hours, but it got done! 

Here's the before and after of the main floor exterior door and the hall closet.  The first picture is part-way through the process after I had replaced the doorknobs on the closet but done nothing else:

And then here they are after everything had been replaced.

Then, the true piece de resistance - the hallway, which includes an exterior door, and doors to the bathroom, bedroom, laundry room, and linen closet.  If you cast your mind back a month ago to when I started working on this, I started with these white enamel knobs and satin nickel hinges on most of the doors, with satin nickel knob and hinges on the exterior door.  (Again, these pictures were taken after I had started, so you'll see the bathroom door already has the oil-rubbed bronze doorknob but nothing else had been done yet) 

And now...control yourselves...the finished product.

So cool, right???  I love how tied together and distinctive it looks.  Everything is just a little crisper.  When it all was all over with, I was left with this mess of discarded hinges, knobs, and screws to clean up, but it was totally worth it.

Thanks to all who helped get this thing done!  The hallway is sooooooooo close to looking the way I want.  Last thing to do (which I should be able to report on shortly) is the replacement of this uggo light fixture.

Soon, it too will be just an unpleasant memory.