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solarbirdFirst: today was Door Hardware Day, and all of Apartment 2's surviving original-era locksets now work again (tho' I think one is a later replacement, it works too), and have appropriate hardware on them, and new doorknobs except for the front door set which I kept, and which, originally, are the template for the new-make old-style I ended up buying. They're identical except for age. S'funny.
(I ended up having to go with clear glass instead of coloured glass; the company that makes the coloured-glass knobs uses a nonstandard spindle size, apparently just so they can force you to buy their locksets. I have six good locksets, original ones; I don't need more.)
And they all work and they all latch, including the bathroom (!) which hasn't had a properly-latching door in at least three paint jobs before I got here, which is, to my mind, criminal. (They used a surface-mount bolt instead. I've replaced that too, with chrome, because pulling the latch for it out of the frame would have been no fun, and besides, a privacy lock is nice.)
But back on point.
Apartment 2 once had wooden closet doors in all four bedrooms. One was still hanging when we got there; I let Ian put it in the basement when he was living in that bedroom, because it was the smallest bedroom and he wanted to put a chair in front of the closet door. The other three are gone. Two of the doorframes still had their hinges when we got here; one's had been taken done, and the missing wood filled in.
But nobody who has owned this place has been the type to throw anything away. At least, not in a long, long time.
Din's doors have had three kinds of doorplates - that's the metal thing around the doorknob spindle that may and may not have a keyhole for an old-style skeleton-key lock. For reference, I'll call them "plain" (the cheap replacement type still available in most hardware stores - flat metal with beveled edges), "rounded," for one that has rounded corners and decorative piping around the edges, in a vaguely early-deco style, and "squared," which has inverted square corners and decorative piping around the edges. The latter two are really quite nice; the "plain" type isn't so interesting, particularly when it's been painted over a zillion times.
I think the squared-corner type are the originals. The rounded-corners one may also have been original, but I honestly don't know. They were on the door with the most atypical lockset, but it's also a door that I wouldn't attribute to Mr. Fixit; it, and its hardware, are much too old. It might have been a replacement for another door that got damaged, or somesuch; I just have no way of knowing.
But back to the closet doors.
The one closet door which remained is in the room Mr. Fixit made smaller. The door into that room isn't like any other door in the house; clearly, that's him at work. (It has had at least three types of doorplates; one quite small, rectangular, but I don't know anything about the style; the most recent was the "plain" type described above.) I also suspect the closet is him in action, so that door is likely not typical either. It has the "plain" type doorplates.
Chris's old room - I still think of it that way, it's now the Green Room - also got, um, adjusted by Mr. Fixit. Then, on top of that, Chris replaced the lockset on its main door with a modern one and I think I stupidly didn't tell him to keep the doorplates for me. (I think I kept the lockset. Hopefully this means that the doorplates were the "plain" type, but I don't know. I should go through the hardware that's floating around in the basement; it might prove illuminating.)
The bedroom that opens onto the living room is probably the least monkeyed-with room in the whole apartment. Its main doorplates were a mixed pair, one plain - but one with square corners. The bathroom door had one with square corners, and one plain. And the door to the final bedroom had square-corner plates on both sides.
Anyway, that's why I think the square-corners are indicative of the original doors of Din.
I was down in the basement, looking at stuff and thinking. There's a few doors standing around down there; one is the door Ian took off his closet; one is a door from our kitchen, leading to the entry area; we never closed it and it was constantly in the way, so I took it down. And one is the door from Mimi's kitchen to the basement, taken off its hinges when we removed that door entirely.
It has square-corner doorplates.
Mr. Fixit is the genius who separated the bottom-floor flat into two parts, one without a bathroom. We're pretty certain of that.
Back upstairs, someone had put up plastic accordion-style ... things ... that you could pull across the front of the closets to hide what was in them. They were awful, and we removed them. And they reek of Mr. Fixit.
I think that's one.
We found a nice wooden door out in the carriage house when we moved in; we put it in the back half's lower flat, into the doorframe that connected Sarah Kaye's living room to the hallway that goes to the bathroom, and now also goes to Mimi's kitchen. Eventually, Jane (a subleter of Sarah's) stripped the paint off of it - a hellish job. It didn't occur to me until tonight that it has square-corner doorplates. On both sides.
So I think that's two.
I don't know about Nr. 3. There's a door that I took down that separated two parts of the basement; but it's had a door there a long, long time - before the back half was even added. (Then, it was a doorway going outside.) So I doubt that's it. But there's at least a couple of other possibilities. 1) The Admiralty was a Mr. Fixit production. It has a door going out into the basement, and a door going to the kitchen. Both have been laminated, but one has a plain doorplate remaining on one side. I don't remember about the other. If that were square-type, that'd be a big clue. He also put in the basement bathroom; that could be it, too, but I think - again - that it has plain-type doorplates.
Also, there was once, I think, a door in the old doorway from Din's living room to its kitchen, before I pulled all that out. (The door itself was long gone, but I'm pretty sure it had once had a door; it had that type of decorative moulding along the top, and I kept both of them.) It might have also had that type of doorplate, and could throw off the count by one.
Anyway, even after all that, there's still the question of whether we want to put them back. Big closet doors have a large swing area. What I'm doing for the time being is replacing them with fabric curtains, which look alright and, most importantly, take up essentially no space. And I don't know. I'm really in a mood to put everything back like it was, but I don't know whether that's... I dunno... sane. Or worth doing. I can't put the one that I used for Sarah Kaye's living room back; we had to cut it down to make it fit. (And then, when I was putting it up, I was amused to discover that someone had taken down a door from the very same place - when I chiseled out the hinge slots, I found wood filler. Oh well!) The suspect door that came back out of Mimi's kitchen has had a peephole drilled into it and a lot of extraneous hardware added. (Of course, that could be taken back out.) And the door from Ian's bedroom is just sitting down there, waiting to be re-hung.
So I don't know. I really don't.
Oh, if you've read this far(!), here's the new hardware arrangement:
Front door; outside, plain style, but in nickel. Nickel-and-glass doorknob. Inside: rounded original-era plate, brass-and-glass doorknob.
Closet door, entry area: outside, rounded original-era plate, brass-and-glass doorknob (original from front door). Inside; plain-style original-era plate, brass-and-glass doorknob (original from front door).
All three surviving original-style bedroom doors: outside, square-corner original-era plates; inside, new reproduction cast-brass edged plate. Not really as period as would be best, it's a little too classical, but it did exist at the time. Brass-and-glass doorknobs on both sides.
Bathroom: outside, square-corner original-era plates, brass-and-glass doorknob; inside, larger plain-style nickel doorplate, nickel-and-glass doorknob. (The glass parts are identical across all the doorknobs, including the surviving original from the front door; the metal parts are the same shape across the two types of metals.)
Extra hardware: bathroom strike plate (replacement) in brass, and bathroom sliding-lock, replaced with a new and very similar piece in chrome. Also, I had to replace a spring in one of the locksets, undo a bad reassembly in another, and repair a manufacturing defect (!) in a third.
And that's what I did today!
(I ended up having to go with clear glass instead of coloured glass; the company that makes the coloured-glass knobs uses a nonstandard spindle size, apparently just so they can force you to buy their locksets. I have six good locksets, original ones; I don't need more.)
And they all work and they all latch, including the bathroom (!) which hasn't had a properly-latching door in at least three paint jobs before I got here, which is, to my mind, criminal. (They used a surface-mount bolt instead. I've replaced that too, with chrome, because pulling the latch for it out of the frame would have been no fun, and besides, a privacy lock is nice.)
But back on point.
Apartment 2 once had wooden closet doors in all four bedrooms. One was still hanging when we got there; I let Ian put it in the basement when he was living in that bedroom, because it was the smallest bedroom and he wanted to put a chair in front of the closet door. The other three are gone. Two of the doorframes still had their hinges when we got here; one's had been taken done, and the missing wood filled in.
But nobody who has owned this place has been the type to throw anything away. At least, not in a long, long time.
Din's doors have had three kinds of doorplates - that's the metal thing around the doorknob spindle that may and may not have a keyhole for an old-style skeleton-key lock. For reference, I'll call them "plain" (the cheap replacement type still available in most hardware stores - flat metal with beveled edges), "rounded," for one that has rounded corners and decorative piping around the edges, in a vaguely early-deco style, and "squared," which has inverted square corners and decorative piping around the edges. The latter two are really quite nice; the "plain" type isn't so interesting, particularly when it's been painted over a zillion times.
I think the squared-corner type are the originals. The rounded-corners one may also have been original, but I honestly don't know. They were on the door with the most atypical lockset, but it's also a door that I wouldn't attribute to Mr. Fixit; it, and its hardware, are much too old. It might have been a replacement for another door that got damaged, or somesuch; I just have no way of knowing.
But back to the closet doors.
The one closet door which remained is in the room Mr. Fixit made smaller. The door into that room isn't like any other door in the house; clearly, that's him at work. (It has had at least three types of doorplates; one quite small, rectangular, but I don't know anything about the style; the most recent was the "plain" type described above.) I also suspect the closet is him in action, so that door is likely not typical either. It has the "plain" type doorplates.
Chris's old room - I still think of it that way, it's now the Green Room - also got, um, adjusted by Mr. Fixit. Then, on top of that, Chris replaced the lockset on its main door with a modern one and I think I stupidly didn't tell him to keep the doorplates for me. (I think I kept the lockset. Hopefully this means that the doorplates were the "plain" type, but I don't know. I should go through the hardware that's floating around in the basement; it might prove illuminating.)
The bedroom that opens onto the living room is probably the least monkeyed-with room in the whole apartment. Its main doorplates were a mixed pair, one plain - but one with square corners. The bathroom door had one with square corners, and one plain. And the door to the final bedroom had square-corner plates on both sides.
Anyway, that's why I think the square-corners are indicative of the original doors of Din.
I was down in the basement, looking at stuff and thinking. There's a few doors standing around down there; one is the door Ian took off his closet; one is a door from our kitchen, leading to the entry area; we never closed it and it was constantly in the way, so I took it down. And one is the door from Mimi's kitchen to the basement, taken off its hinges when we removed that door entirely.
It has square-corner doorplates.
Mr. Fixit is the genius who separated the bottom-floor flat into two parts, one without a bathroom. We're pretty certain of that.
Back upstairs, someone had put up plastic accordion-style ... things ... that you could pull across the front of the closets to hide what was in them. They were awful, and we removed them. And they reek of Mr. Fixit.
I think that's one.
We found a nice wooden door out in the carriage house when we moved in; we put it in the back half's lower flat, into the doorframe that connected Sarah Kaye's living room to the hallway that goes to the bathroom, and now also goes to Mimi's kitchen. Eventually, Jane (a subleter of Sarah's) stripped the paint off of it - a hellish job. It didn't occur to me until tonight that it has square-corner doorplates. On both sides.
So I think that's two.
I don't know about Nr. 3. There's a door that I took down that separated two parts of the basement; but it's had a door there a long, long time - before the back half was even added. (Then, it was a doorway going outside.) So I doubt that's it. But there's at least a couple of other possibilities. 1) The Admiralty was a Mr. Fixit production. It has a door going out into the basement, and a door going to the kitchen. Both have been laminated, but one has a plain doorplate remaining on one side. I don't remember about the other. If that were square-type, that'd be a big clue. He also put in the basement bathroom; that could be it, too, but I think - again - that it has plain-type doorplates.
Also, there was once, I think, a door in the old doorway from Din's living room to its kitchen, before I pulled all that out. (The door itself was long gone, but I'm pretty sure it had once had a door; it had that type of decorative moulding along the top, and I kept both of them.) It might have also had that type of doorplate, and could throw off the count by one.
Anyway, even after all that, there's still the question of whether we want to put them back. Big closet doors have a large swing area. What I'm doing for the time being is replacing them with fabric curtains, which look alright and, most importantly, take up essentially no space. And I don't know. I'm really in a mood to put everything back like it was, but I don't know whether that's... I dunno... sane. Or worth doing. I can't put the one that I used for Sarah Kaye's living room back; we had to cut it down to make it fit. (And then, when I was putting it up, I was amused to discover that someone had taken down a door from the very same place - when I chiseled out the hinge slots, I found wood filler. Oh well!) The suspect door that came back out of Mimi's kitchen has had a peephole drilled into it and a lot of extraneous hardware added. (Of course, that could be taken back out.) And the door from Ian's bedroom is just sitting down there, waiting to be re-hung.
So I don't know. I really don't.
Oh, if you've read this far(!), here's the new hardware arrangement:
Front door; outside, plain style, but in nickel. Nickel-and-glass doorknob. Inside: rounded original-era plate, brass-and-glass doorknob.
Closet door, entry area: outside, rounded original-era plate, brass-and-glass doorknob (original from front door). Inside; plain-style original-era plate, brass-and-glass doorknob (original from front door).
All three surviving original-style bedroom doors: outside, square-corner original-era plates; inside, new reproduction cast-brass edged plate. Not really as period as would be best, it's a little too classical, but it did exist at the time. Brass-and-glass doorknobs on both sides.
Bathroom: outside, square-corner original-era plates, brass-and-glass doorknob; inside, larger plain-style nickel doorplate, nickel-and-glass doorknob. (The glass parts are identical across all the doorknobs, including the surviving original from the front door; the metal parts are the same shape across the two types of metals.)
Extra hardware: bathroom strike plate (replacement) in brass, and bathroom sliding-lock, replaced with a new and very similar piece in chrome. Also, I had to replace a spring in one of the locksets, undo a bad reassembly in another, and repair a manufacturing defect (!) in a third.
And that's what I did today!
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Date: 2004-01-27 03:46 am (UTC)Just reading what you are doing exhausts me. I feel quite accomplished that I managed to recaulk the tub so our dining room ceiling doesn't collapse. (Of course, some of the caulk I had to remove felt like it must have been 75 years old. But still.) Sounds like the place looks marvelous! I'm looking forward to pictures.
Cathy