Some of my fellow bloggers post pictures of beautiful or interesting doors on Thursdays. I’m over here writin about door fail on a Tuesday.
Home improvement bloggers are all, “It’s such a relief to have changed all my doorknobs to oil-rubbed bronze!” and I’m all, “Bitch, you don’t know my pain.”
What can I say, I enjoy not quite fitting in.
Old houses come with quirks. That’s part of their charm.
All of the doors in this house have charm.
All. I’m not exaggerating!
Before we’d really moved in, The Mister and I had been keeping long hours at the house, painting and cleaning. One afternoon, we lay down on our mattress-on-the-floor to take a nap. When I woke up I realized we were locked in our bedroom. IN. As in, the lock is in the hallway!?!
omg omg omg lemme out!!!
Huh? So we should ask the kids to lock us in when it’s time to sex? Fortunately, The Mister got us out and fixed that right away, but the door still doesn’t make good connection with the jamb. If we don’t lock it, the wind can open it.
A week or so later, we discovered we hadn’t been given all the keys to all the locks. How did we find that out? Well, we got locked out of our own house, that’s how. And not just any ol time, either. No, we found out we were locked out late at night, and we still didn’t have wi-fi, so finding a locksmith was a real struggle.
We got a new locking doorknob on the front door around midnight that night.
Still doesn’t change the fact that the deadbolt is ridiculously hard to turn, or that the storm door is hung opposite the actual door. That’s right, the handles are on opposite sides.
locksmiths charge more after 6pm you know
That’s why we often use the back door, where at least the handles agree with one another. Of course, the locks on that door are unbearable to someone with arthritis, and they also turn the wrong way. Or one of them does. I dunno. I struggle. It hurts. I get confused and flustered. Maybe one of them is upside-down, or they’re both upside-down and one is backward. Did I mention it hurts me? Additionally, the tension spring has come off the back storm door, and it’s slightly crooked, so ya gotta kick it — it’s called a kick plate for a reason. Then when it opens, you gotta latch it, or the kitten will run outside. I’m advocating a keyless entry and no storm door.
I’m also in favor of removing our beautiful-but-painful porcelain tile back there, because the door is so flush to the floor, we can’t have a properly-placed rug. Sill the crooked door features a gaping hole in the corner of the frame. It’s great for those days when you need an arctic breeze, or when you want to host a June Bug family reunion.
The pantry doorknob constantly fell out, and I didn’t have a pretty enough screwdriver, so we bought a new doorknob and The Mister replaced it.
About a month after living here, The Mister re-hung the bathroom door and shaved off several crooked slivers from the bottom. It’s so much better. Now it almost opens all the way, and it closes properly. It won’t lock. It gives one the curious impression that it’s locked, but it is never locked. It doesn’t latch properly enough to lock. Talk about a false sense of security! It’s so not latched, that if one of our pets wants to watch you do whatever you’d like to do behind closed doors, you have no choice in the matter.
Door to the master bath has a lock that doesn’t work, either.
at least we can close ours…
It’s a good thing we’re not really a closed-door type of family, especially since most of the time it’s just us girls. We respect closed doors and always knock, but when we do want privacy we often make announcements about it. I’m not even kiddin.
Three-out-of-five sets of sliding closet doors were removed right around the same time, because they didn’t have floor tracks installed to keep them in place and re-hanging them was a bit constant and therefore maddening. Honestly, downright dangerous to Moo, who could easily be injured by heavy falling doors.
Sassy’s door had a crack in the jamb, which I fixed and then The Mister re-fixed, and her lock doesn’t work, either. Additionally, when you open the door, it scrapes across her plush carpet with resistance, because it’s hung a bit low.
Moo’s door has a charming gap under it. Her lock works, of course. Moos love to run to their rooms, slam and lock the door, and cry themselves to sleep before dinner’s done, so that they can wake up at 0430 and try to nap as their sisters get up for school.
The hallway closet also has a large gap under it, which is where the wood floor stops abruptly, with much ugly.
i guess they had the same floor guy!
The laundry door features the same gap, and is a bit tricky to close. Gotta give it a bit of a slam. This isn’t hard for me as I’m often eager to release some anger when dealing with laundry, cat boxes, the furnace…
In the kitchen, we have a broom closet, and it works properly. Okay, it swells noticeably in the summer, but wood does that, and a lil soap on the edges helps. The cute thing about the broom closet is that it locks from the outside. You know, in case you’ve got one of those brooms or mops that like to sneak out at night and work without you. A girl can dream.
Even our garage doors have charm. By charm, I mean, they need to be replaced.
wow. okay, ours is better than this one…
Hey! I think the shed doors are good!
We’ll probably live with these charming quirks for years to come. We probably won’t ever replace the doors in the back hallway. They’re old, solid wood beauties.
Do you find some quirks more annoying than charming, too? Do y’all have door issues? What home projects are lowest on your list?
joeyfullystated 
The quirks in other people’s houses are charming. The ones in your house are hysterical. The ones in my house? They’re not even remotely funny, unless I’m looking for something to write about.
But we did once move into a house with a garageful of doors–more spare doors than the house had doorways. We tried to give them away. No takers. So we tried to sell them. Still no takers. We finally made two–or was it three?–trips to the city dump with them. (Our car was small.) We never did figure out where they all came from.
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Weird! That’s where our doors are — in the garage! I reckon we’ll use the wood for other things.
Love your comment, thanks 🙂
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We have cheap flooring in our upstairs and basement bathrooms that’s starting to get a yellowish stain. (And no, it’s not pee, though I suppose having three men in the house raises that possibility.) We keep talking about replacing it, but we never do. But when we finally go to sell the house, we’ll probably have to. So then we tell ourselves why not do it now so we can at least enjoy it? And then we promptly forget about it and go on with our lives.
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Mhm. We had some cheap linoleum stuff in our last house (rented on base) and it yellowed under the bath rugs like whoa. I was sure they’d charge us, but they didn’t.
But your last sentence is so apt! 😀
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I hung a brand new really expensive door in our front entry. It was part of a much larger renovation and we decided to spring for it because a) it is the front door and b) we were spending money like drunken sailors on everything else, what’s a door. We don’t even use this door. Anyway, It has this weird integrated weatherstripping which prevented me from trimming it to fit perfectly. It clears the floor, but no room for a rug. It does lock, and it does keep out the arctic breeze which the previous one did not. Doors are the biggest pain in your house – my house – every house.
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You may be onto something there. I’ve had other door troubles in other houses, too — just here a lot more.
Hanging doors is a bit tricky, in my opinion, anyway.
Thanks for chimin in!
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Hanging doors is easy (if you’re doing new constitution). Hanging doors in existing openings is never fun.
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As I write this my french doors leading to the porch are humming. Don’t ask me why but when there are high winds, as there are today, they hum like when you run your finger around the rim of a crystal glass. One-hundred year old houses and doors with personality just seem to go hand in hand.
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True that!
I should have mentioned that the front hallway doors rattle as we walk by 😉
Maybe your French doors just like to whistle with the wind!
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I’m in tears over the “asking the kids to lock us in for sex” part!
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Thanks 😛
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Our house was built in 2011 and we have several doors that don’t close and click into the jamb. One of them is going into our master shower area (toilet is in a different room), and Hub continues to pretend to close and lock the door even though I can touch it with my pinkie and it falls open. So unlike your “charming quirks” in an older home, we just had crappy builders who couldn’t hang doors properly. As also noted by the fact that EVERY door in this damn house squeaks and squeals when opened and closed. It used to REALLY annoy me, but now I can tell when Hub leaves for work in the morning (while I’m still in bed) and/or comes home. And/or lets the dogs out into the backyard. And/or if any burglar tries to sneak into my house. Silver lining?
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Silver lining.
These girls can’t even get up to fetch a glass of water without my hearing it.
Was a bit more annoying when the boy and Simon were here. I kept meaning to put some W-D40 on the hinges, but then I’d go back to sleep…night after night, lol!
Then they left. All better 😉
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I once visited in a huge 18th century house in Switzerland. The owner had decided to replace all the doors and windows in house. There were many of them. It was while the contractor was measuring that he learned there was not one single rectangular opening in the entire house. Can you say “expensive”?
Who knows. You might discover something similar in your house.
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I can say expensive. Oy.
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I too have enjoyed the use of a “back door” but that was when I was young and single.
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Oh the list of quirks with our home is too long to list. We sit down a few times a year to try to knock some of the bigger most annoying ones off the list, but darn if the list doesn’t seem to be getting longer all the same 😦
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Heh, I know it well! — Keep those gorgeous door photos comin!
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This past year we replaced the French doors to the back porch, making it three-for-three for our entry doors in our 11 years in the Little Bitty, Joey. Muuuuuch better fit and insulation than the old door. Yay. The front and side doors helped a bunch when we got them five or six years ago, too. Less gaps to the floor. Screen doors fit way better. Is everything all square, though? No way with a house that’s 70 years old this year. The inside doors all have latch and lock problems like yours, too, Even though there are only four of those, it’s an adventure of some sort. We widened the entry and got a louvered door to the laundry room, which also holds the furnace. The installation was set up through one of the big boxes, where we ordered the custom-sized door. Yeah, they said, we’ll get you the door guy, don’t worry, the door guy is good. I had to laugh when he pulled up with the door and on the side of his van it said The Door Guy.
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I don’t think very much of our house is square, no. Sounds like your door replacements were a huge success!
The Door Guy, heh! I can’t wait til I can call a door guy, let alone THE Door Guy, haha!
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Our house is full of quirks, too. The cabinet doors all stick when you try to open them, because my mother has painted them shut…but somehow in the night they come open. All day long I come out to the kitchen and the drawers and doors are caddywhompus. My father built a door from the kitchen to the living room that opens at the top, so that it could be a barrier for bitty daycare kids, but my mom could look in on them if she was making lunch and had to be in the kitchen. Last year, it was all in one piece but open when I went to the bathroom, I swear. When I walked back through, the bottom part had swung partly shut but it was pitch black in that part of the house so my clumsy ass busted right into it and broke two toes.
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Oh no! That’s awful about your toes! We had a Dutch door, too, and I miss it!
Kinda sounds like y’all have a ghost…
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I think we did in our childhood home without question. I think in this one everything is off center and people don’t shut stuff properly. Or it is a ghost, one or the other 🙂
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Our house has so much charm I’m not even going to get into them, now…but maybe that could be my A-Z project for next year… =)
At least your quirky doors make for good blogging!
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Hah! Mmhm 🙂
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The last house we left was all “charm”, built in the late 1700’s. Before 2 years were up, we were building new construction..just one mile up the road. I have wanted to blog about it for a while now. Thanks for your very funny account of door issues…and for the inspiration ! ☺ Van
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Late 1700’s — sounds amazing!
New construction has its perks, absolutely! We did that in 2000. We are old charming people who like old charming things, but we sure don’t mind a shiny new doorknob! 😀
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We had tall ceilings, deep window wells that were so beautiful, but had no insulation. We filled a 400 gal. oil tank about every month to heat the place. There were 5 fireplaces, none were usable. It had a blocked off staircase to a “servants quarters” addition, and a haunted fruit cellar. Neighbors told tall tales. It sat in the woods by a major river, a haven for wildlife… there was some skunking. The wood floors splintered, painted-shut windows allowed for some mold, basement laundry had no ventilation. It needed TLC, but not from us…we were on lease. It was an adventure for sure !
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I feel your pain… our doors here are all shot to hell, like every. single. one. And I’m dreading trying to do anything with them – the two I’ve worked on already were hard enough. Thankfully, we don’t have any gaps or other inconsistencies in our exterior doors – I would die if I had to entertain June bugs for their family reunion…
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Right? And honestly, I love that back door — it’s mostly window, with the blinds inside? Quite nice for light. But oh the gap!
Old doors so heavy and stubborn! 😛
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One of my bathroom doors opens with a breeze – there’s no knob, just a handle, and the other bathroom door closes but there’s no lock. So if it’s closed you don’t open it. If you’re not in there, you don’t close it. 😛 My closet under the stairs door is old… It has dates and heights of all the kids who have lived in the house since it was built in 1948. I have a picture to post one of these days. 🙂
Sounds like you have some real trouble with some of yours. Most of my trouble comes from water…
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I’d love to see a picture of 48 years of growth!
We never lived anywhere long enough to do that with our kids, and two of them were grown before I saw pins of the oversized ruler that can move with you. Bummer.
I had a water problem once. Nightmare. Messy, costly nightmare, so I am sorry for that bit!
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Before this house, which was built in 1991 and in the two years we’ve lived here has few quirks-now I’ve jinxed myself and the quirks will come out of the woodwork, we lived in a house built in 1928. It had a toilet in the basement, which got torn out when we refinished the basement adding a full bath and play room for the kids. The house flooded whenever we had a storm of the century, which was once a year, both inside with a mixture of sewer and rain water, and in the back yard which sloped down forming a basin with the surrounding backyards which the city told us we could not fill in because then the water would go somewhere else $$#$%. We thought the contractors installed draintile when they did the basement but the numerous floods post refinish indicated otherwise, so after many years of frustration including a boozy valve which literally blocks the sewer line both in and out, we tore out everything, redid the draintile and added an overhead sewer, and refinished it again. Then, we sold it a year later. There are many other charms such as the stenciling on every wall we painted over numerous times, painted brick fire place we almost killed ourselves stripping, wing walls bordering the front steps and front steps that needed replacing, our garage which flooded every time the backyard did. Oh, and when the contractors who finished our basement the first time, they switched a separate water line that ran to our upstairs toilet from cold to scalding hot. We lived with that for oh, seven years or so. It’s loads of fun to get steam burns on your inner thighs when you do your business.
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Oh my God. I remember bits of this from your redoing the plumbing and drains on an earlier post.
There must be a point at which charm becomes downright unacceptable, and I’d have to say steaming nethers and indoor sewer water would do it.
Enjoy your newish house — may the quirks be far from now!
And thanks for commenting!
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Haha…awesome! That garage at the end is really something.
Our 1930s apartment had so many quirks, which I forget half of, but the lack of outlets were the worst. There was a lot of creative cable extensions running over doorways and along the floor. Super classy.
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I was not following you back when this was written but oh so hilarious! Not sure why people laugh at others problems but this is more like “follies,” Joey. 🙂
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