unfortunately even though we accomplished Task we still have to do the shopping

[cimorene]

One thing about updating the decorative arts and design history blog is that my kneejerk loathing of the term "inspo" has me struggling multiple times a week with the strong impulse to block everyone who reblogs my posts with that tag.

It's good for me somehow, probably.

I'm currently exhausted because the spring that pushes the latch bolt out of the kitchen-hall door broke last night after midnight and we spent several hours fixing it this afternoon. Wax took the equivalent spring out of the lockbox of the dining-livingroom door because unfortunately the lockbox is a pre-1940 model and the springs are not manufactured anymore, nor are the parts interchangeable with the later springs from the 40s- model that are still in production, nor can the whole lockbox be easily switched (because the spindle and hole for it are not the same circumference and the boxes themselves can be different sizes). However, the two lockboxes aren't identical. In fact, it looks like the one that broke is the oldest one in the house. She had to squish the spring a bit to get it in, and it wasn't exactly the same shape and size, so we are nervous that it may break soon. (She did all the hard bits with tools, not trusting me not to injure myself, and I cleaned the insides of the lockboxes with q-tips dipped in vinegar and then oiled them with q-tips dipped in mineral oil.) Wax hopes we can get the blacksmith to make a new spring for the spot when that happens, rather than having to replace the entire mechanism, but we don't know how plausible that is.

We can't do without this door and its latch, but the lockboxes on the other doors are all other sizes so they can't be swapped. We need it latched to keep the cats apart! They're making progress, and they've touched noses now, but Tristana still retreats any time Sipuli gets a little excited, and they are only meeting with Sipuli on the leash.

Comments

[princessofgeeks]

Argh!

[cimorene]

If it's not one thing, it's another😬

[isilya]

Old houses man! I'm currently going through this exact same process, and basically have just committed to the awful job of gutting the doors of their ancient cartridge style lock/handle mechanisms (mortise locks), filling the empty space with new timber blocks and glue, letting all that set, then drilling out holes for new hardware, sanding, repainting doors.

Our house is a 1901 bungalow but none of the interior is original at all, as best I can tell it was (badly) renovated in the fifties and then again in the nineties. I can't bear the rickety feeling of mortise hardware so the only option is the cylinder conversion.

My husband has spent the last ten years using "technique" to open/close the doors (if you don't use the correct "technique" the handle rips off in your hand UGH) but it's such an awful and large job that I've been putting it off lol.

[cimorene]

Huh. Our one new interior door also has a mortise! Also our modern insulated exterior door. Okay, Wikipedia says they have been supplanted in some parts of the world but are still standard throughout Europe.

Our interior door handles don't feel rickety, though. That's part of the charm of older houses here; they are wonderfully solid and heavy in the hand, and I love them (modern standard ones are comparatively flimsy, but you can replace them with reproduction and retro style ones which is what I did for our new upstairs bathroom door). It's much more solid than the round 19th-early 20th c. crystal doorknobs in the Victorian house I grew up in. There were doorknobs that had a tendency to come off there too, which is probably caused by stripping of the spindle or the parts of the knob that attach to it, I guess?

But we love the doors and the handles in our house - this classic model handle called pukinsarvi (goat horn) in Finnish which was used pretty universally in Sweden and Finland from the 1940s-50s. And the mechanisms all worked smoothly until the spring in this one broke. And the insides didn't have much gunk in them, and almost no rust, surprisingly, since the ones we looked at were made before 1940. Replacing the mechanism would also probably be more of a pain when it would mean replacing with a new manufacture mortise that would probably be almost the same size.

Snapshots Wax wanted taken for posterity:

[isilya]

I hope you can repair yours or find ones of the same exact dimensions!

I am super lucky that our next door neighbour is a 76 year old guy whose reason for living is fixing problems for other people-—he literally spends all his time doing little jobs for widows in his catholic parish, the nuns, and his friends.

I don’t know if you have any access to the hobbyist handyman population where you are! In Tasmania there were “Repair Cafes” and “Men’s Sheds” and Facebook groups where you could ask for help.

My beef with mortise locks stems from the fact that it’s only the spindle + set screw holding the door handle on/together through the door. The crystal door knobs of your childhood and my current house are the same mechanism. The spindle can’t be tightened much because then the knob won’t turn. So there tends to be a rattley looseness even before the spindle start stripping.

[cimorene]

Yes, that's the problem with them. These type of doorhandles don't seem to want to come off in that way, although it is only a metal pin - in the newer ones that look the same it's a screw though - holding them together. The spindle is part of one of them, not a separate piece, and it's square in profile and fits a pretty long way into the other half, so the whole handle apparatus is pretty strong.

But yeah, those antique door knobs and latches were pretty hopeless. Even the ones that weren't stripped were rattly. I suspect a lot of them stick around for precisely your reason - nobody wants to replace an old door with a new one that's inferior, but you have to do a whole dutchman to change the mechanism and that's not an entry level task. I think I remember the front door of my childhood house had had that done actually, to replace it with a 70s-modern locking knob.

[cimorene]

I don't think I've run across any of those guys locally yet, but I've heard people talking about them from time to time. We have had a local handyman company do a few tasks before though, and they were good... but we thought maybe not prepared to replace this spring. There are some architectural salvage shops in our general area, like within an hour or so - two of them, both small enough to have very bad websites and far enough away that we haven't been yet, but they're fairly likely to have something that would work I think. 🤞

[cimorene]

That all sounds bad and tragic, but you might have missed a bullet with the renovations being before and after the 1960s-70s. For some reason, they were especially awful then. Though bad renovations of any era are no laughing matter. The Victorian I grew up in was completely done in the 70s.

My mom took like ten years to redo the windows in it, lol.