Dork-knob

We've talked about my doorknobs before.  A few times.  Half of them are original brass, perfectly petite, and the other half are a random assortment of butt-ugly orange monstrosities.  One of my first projects upon move-in nearly a year ago was to clean years of paint off the pretty (little) brass rosettes of the original knobs, and one of my most recent was finding vintage knobs to replace the ugly ones.  I wasn't sure if it'd work, so I started small with two sets of knobs-- one half-brass and half-chrome for the bathroom door and one brass pair for the guest room door.  If it works, I thought, I'll get another passage set for the guest-room closet and one for the soon-to-be-reno'd third bedroom; I'll also need a locking set for the door between the kitchen and the laundry room.

I'm just going to stop you right here, because I know what you're thinking-- only a total weirdo would spend $30 per door to replace ugly-but-functional doorknobs in a 1350-square-foot house.  You're right-- it's hardly Versailles, and the next buyer probably won't be quite as doorknob-obsessed as I am.  So from an investment standpoint, it's pretty stupid.  But from a mental-health standpoint, this is an absolutely mandatory upgrade.  And in case you doubt how truly hideous some of these knobs are, I present Exhibit A:

Gooooooo!  And if that's not enough, allow me to introduce a side-by-side shot of the bathroom knob (left, obviously) next to the vintage one I bought to replace it:

See?  SEE?  Now if that's not worth $30 of vintage door hardware, I don't know what is.  

Unfortunately, my worst fears were confirmed when we got back to Oregon last week and discovered that the ugly doorknobs were, in fact, attached to new-style guts-- so of course my spindle knobs weren't going to work.  We spent a hilarious week with no bathroom doorknob while Ray's parents stayed in our house with us.  If you really want to get to know your family, share a knob-less bathroom with them.  It's an experience, I assure you.  Fortunately, my wonderful in-laws handled it with grace and never once complained that I'd seemingly removed the doorknob immediately before they arrived just to make their seven days in Oregon as uncomfortable as possible. 

Meanwhile, I started doing a little research on houseofantiquehardware.com, and I thought I'd found the piece I needed to make my knobs work.  Here's what it looks like.  I still wasn't sure it was the right thing, but I ordered one for the princely sum of $5.95.  I also ordered some 3" rosettes, since the hole that'd been bored in my door to make way for the HUGE modern knob was too large to permit me to screw in my pretty little (2.25") vintage rosettes. 

What I didn't know is that House of Antique Hardware is located in Portland (yay Rose City!) and I got my hardware the next day.  I think my mother-in-law was a bit bemused when the package came and I started jumping up and down like a maniac and interrupted our conversation to run to the tool closet for a Phillips head.  But she shared my excitement when, two screws and fifteen hot seconds later, my bathroom door had functional vintage knobs on it:

Love.

Unfortunately,  I don't love the look of the bigger rosette:

 I really prefer the smaller vintage one as seen ob my entry closet door:

 

And I think I know how to make it work, so I'm currently planning an ambitious door-retrofitting project that I'll report back on shortly.  And the big rosette doesn't bother me nearly as much on the chrome bathroom side:

But at this point, after tracking down the perfect doorknobs and rosettes (they're an exact match to the original knobs I already had) and traveling 3000 miles with them, I'm inclined to see this mini-project through as completely as possible.  So retrofitting it is!  And I also need to order about a million more Standard Back Set Tubular Conversion Latches (say THAT five times fast) from House of Antique Hardware so I can do all the other doors.  And I have to find more sets of matching vintage knobs.  One thing at a time, right?

  

[Caravati's] Is A Wonderland*

Hello from the East Coast!  We're currently in my hometown of Richmond, Virginia.  As always, I'm thrilled to be here.  Though we're Pacific Northwesterners now--and there are plenty of things to like about the left coast-- I will always be a Virginian.  

 

I'm sorry I'm not sorry, but I'm insufferably snobby about where I'm from.  After all, American history is Virginia history.  Since the first colonists settled at Jamestown in 1607, Virginians have been making it happen, and Richmond's illustrious history is reflected by its incredible architectural diversity.  Only here you can stroll along gorgeous Monument Avenue (lovingly nicknamed "Avenue of Losers" for its statues of Confederate military heroes) and then pop over to Jackson Ward to check out the home of Maggie Walker, the first African-American female bank president in the country and by all accounts an exceptional woman.  The River City has everything from antebellum farmhouses to suburban colonials, Federal rowhouses to forties bungalows. You name it, it's here: nineteenth-century tobacco warehouses, skyscrapers, a relocated fifteenth-century Tudor estate, Neoclassical and Italianate train stations, an igloo house and a milk bottle building.  A quick one-hour trip out of town takes you east to colonial Williamsburg and Yorktown, from whence our very own George Washington sent the British packing, or west to Charlottesville and Jefferson's Monticello (and our alma mater, the University of Virginia, where we met).  I mean, there's a reason we Virginians are proud of our state.  

Anyhow, a lot of historic buildings equals a lot of architectural salvage.  And if you like salvage like I like salvage, you should check out Caravati's.  Today we went there in search of a few things for our old house, and we left with our pockets full of doorknobs.

As I've mentioned before, the crazy-doorknob situation in my house is out. of. control.  There are three doors in the house that still sport their original brass knobs:

 

I love those.  There are also a million doors in the house that have huge mismatched shiny orange eighties knobs.  After discovering the exact knobs and rosettes I needed over at houseofantiquehardware.com a few months ago, I filled a virtual shopping cart with them.  I emptied it when I realized they cost $90 per pair.  I've been patiently waiting, cringing every time I grabbed a massive cheap doorknob, for my opportunity to check the stock at Caravati's.  I knew they'd have what I needed.  And they did:

 

Blurry iPhone photo.  Anyway, check out all. those. brass. doorknobs.  We picked up two pairs: one for the second bedroom and one for the bathroom.  The bathroom set is especially cool-- brass on one side (for the hallway, where it'll match all the other brass knobs) and chrome on the other (so it will coordinate with the chrome fixtures in the bathroom).  We were also on the hunt for a brass mailbox, and we struck out.  But while we were there we decided to poke around a little, and these were a few of my favorite things:

Safety first, right?  Next up: a blurry photo of some clawfoot tubs.  Pardon the terrible photography-- we stopped at Legends for lunch on the way to Caravati's.  I had a beer.  Sue me-- day drinking is what the South is all about.

Ooh!  Multicolored forties porcelain toilet-paper holders!  Too bad we don't need these.  I really like the Tiffany-blue ones:

Vintage toilets vintage toilets vintagetoiletsvintagetoiletsvintagetoilets:

And a rack of multicolored toilet-tank lids in the stairwell because why not:

Corbels and corbels all day long.  I love 'em:

One tenth of one percent of the windows you can find in Caravati's:

More windows?  Right this way:

So we'll be heading back to Oregon with some very heavy vintage Virginia doorknobs in our luggage.  I'm always thrilled when a little bit of Virginia makes it out to the West Coast, but I'm never happy when my baggage is overweight.  Cross your fingers for us.  I'm shooting for 49.9lbs.

*Do forgive me for paraphrasing John Mayer.  He is both a racist and a no-talent asshole.  His songs and dress sense are aggressively awful, and I will say ten Our Fathers and one hundred Hail Marys tonight as penance for the title of this post.

A Million Little Projects

Long time, no post-- we haven't done much of substance around here lately.  We've arrived-- much sooner than I thought-- at the point where all the things that need to be done are a) infinitesimally tiny and more or less invisible to the naked eye, or b) absolutely massive and impossible to do by ourselves.  Even still, in the couple of weeks since I posted, I've...

1.  acquired a new dining room rug which is totally the wrong color but I might keep it anyway
2.  painted one dining room chair a darker gray to see if I like it (I don't)
3.  finished the RASTs with hardware I painted to match (photos of all this in a minute)
4.  repainted the master bedroom ceiling
5.  lost out on a midcentury Baker console table I really liked via an eBay auction
6.  worked some more on the bathroom ceiling
7.  re-patched the master bedroom walls where the spackle I'd used had shrunk
8.  killed / vacuumed up about 367,721,003 flies
9.  finished half the rat-proofing around the foundation (more on that in a bit), and
10. weeded the front yard.

Obviously most of that stuff is tiny and inconsequential-- like, I know I shouldn't really list "killing flies" as a home-improvement project.  But when your house has dead rats (hey, at least we know the poison's working, and this time we couldn't smell it/them) and there are literally tens of huge furry flesh flies on the lamp in your laundry room, killing them feels like both a job and an accomplishment.  And losing an eBay auction is also not a project, but it did take up quite a bit of my time.  The table was gorgeous, but I plan to console myself by... well, we'll get to that in another post.

First things first: the dining room rug.  I have no distance photos, and between all these projects the dining room is way too messy to bother photographing now (from my current vantage point on the sofa, I can see two bags of grass seed, a tube of wood filler, tin snips, my shop vac, a gallon of ceiling paint, my yardwork shoes, two screwdrivers, etc. etc. in the dining room), so this is the best I can do:

Yeah, we'll talk about the pizza-box-with-primed-hardware-on-it in a minute.  For now, the rug.  It's an indoor/outdoor, which I thought was a really good idea for the Pacific Northwest, but the real reason I bought it was its shape: a 6'7" square was exactly what I needed.  I didn't find too many options in the 7' square arena, and this one promised to be a very inexpensive (like, less than $100) gray and ivory quatrefoil-patterned godsend.  It is, in fact, the right size, and I really like it.  It's one of those Safavieh ones and it looks and feels like a nice flatwoven rug.  However, as you may be able to tell from the photo, it's not really gray.  It's more of a French blue.  And that is pretty much the ONLY color not found in my living-room rug.  Ugh.

I've decided to keep it while casually looking for another 7' square to replace it-- when I find something, this one will go outside to our covered patio, where it will someday be joined by two comfy armchairs and some kind of cocktail table.  

Anyway, the French blue leads us to our next conundrum: what to do with the dining room chairs?  As you can see in the above photo, the light gray I chose when I first bought them looks like primer, but the Home Depot didn't have any other appealing gray options.  So the last time I was in Salem I stopped by Lowe's (yes, the closest Lowe's is forty-five minutes away) to check out their spraypaint selection and I came home with something that promised to be a little darker.  After patiently waiting months for the weather to warm up, I finally took one chair outside and sprayed it on Friday.  Results:

You're right, it is not gray.  It is teal.  This is obviously a no-go. 

At the moment I'm thinking I sand the hell out of them, beef up their joints a bit, and go semi-gloss white.  I'm kind of feeling the Hollywood Regency thing these days, and if the question is WWJAD (What Would Jonathan Adler Do?) then the answer is always glossy white.  Thoughts?

Let's go back to that first photo for a minute:

Yes, you are absolutely looking at a pizza box with a bunch of hardware on it-- I needed something into which to screw the hardware for my RASTs while I painted it.  This pizza box happened to be handy, which is strange because we order pizza about once in NEVER out here.  

Tangent: the pizza in Oregon is absolute shit.  Shit, shit, shit.  Yes, I was a bit spoiled by New Haven (before you even say anything, Modern is the best apizza, and I miss it ALL. THE. DAMN. TIME, like sometimes I have dreams where I'm eating it), but even if I hadn't lived in the land of pizza perfection, I still wouldn't like the super doughy, yeasty, extra-sweet-saucy, limp-dishraggy disaster that passes for pizza in the Pacific Northwest. 

Anyway, we ordered pizza last week because we are stupidly optimistic people and we always think that just this one time the pizza's going to be okay.  Spoiler alert: it never is.  But anyway I had the pizza box so I screwed in my faux-bamboo hardware:

A short handle for the top and bottom drawers of each RAST and a long handle for the less-adorned middle drawers.  These came from coolknobsandpulls.com, which had the least-expensive faux-bamboo pulls, and since I planned to paint them it didn't matter that the 5in. ones were nickel and the 7in. ones were bronze.

I primed 'em with some metal-bonding spray primer:

Painted 'em with an artist's brush:

Drilled holes in my drawerfronts, and screwed 'em in:

  

Oof, horrible photo quality.  Let's try that again:

 

Even worse.  Well, I tried.  

Anyhow, I think the RASTS look pretty boss now.  No guarantees that I won't decide to do a little something with the awkward space under the bottom drawer, but that'll have to wait til I get a jigsaw.  And my birthday is coming up in just four short months (Dad)!

Cleanup on Aisle 9

No, despite its title, this isn't a post about shopping.  It's about doorknobs.  Specifically, cleaning paint off of them.  I know it's exciting, but you're just going to have to try to contain yourself. 

Our house was built in the 40's, and since then it's had its share of owners.  After a quick look around the house, one can clearly see that each of these past inhabitants must have decided to change just one doorknob in order to, I don't know, make the place seem more current or something?  This means that from my present vantage point on the sofa in the living room, I can see five different kinds of doorknobs.  And I can't stand it.  Some are shiny brass, some are "antique" brass, some are the original patinaed brass, and one is chrome (why?).  They're all different sizes and shapes.  But this is also not a post about replacing the mismatched not-original doorknobs with vintage ones, which is going to require some good luck and perseverance and a lot of Googling.

It's about the three doors in the house that still have their original forties hardware.  Over the course of the past sixty-some-odd years, everyone who painted the trim added his (or her!) own special paint color to the hardware.  It's like a bunch of kindergartners painted the place.  Is it really too time-consuming to a) paint carefully around the metal hardware or b) remove the doorknobs and tape the hinges before you do your very own Jackson-Pollock-and/or-Mark-Rothko-style paint job?

The hinges are so paint-covered it's a wonder they still work.  And being my mother's child, I cannot bear paint-covered hinges. (Side note / shout-out to my mom, thanks to whom my sister and I can paint anything quickly and neatly.  We did a lot of family interior paint projects in my childhood home, and Mom does not mess around where crappy paint jobs are concerned.  You prime when necessary, tape when it'll save you time, and buy quality supplies.  Or it will look like... all the paint jobs in this house looked when we moved in.  Shudder.)  And the knobs' brass backplates all looked like this:

I mean, seriously.  That is ridiculous.  It's been making me crazy since before we even bought the house.  

In a fit of madness this afternoon, I decided to do something about it.  Practice for the hinges, which I think will be a much bigger job since their backplates have actually been painted into the wood, like, fifty million times.  I wanted to see if a little scalding-water soak and some elbow grease would restore the brass to its pre-careless-paint-job appearance before I tried detaching all the hinges.

So I detached the knobs and the backplates, and off to the sink we went:

    Top backplate: one I'd scrubbed; bottom backplate: one that'd just gone into the bath.

And then I screwed them all back onto their respective doors, and this is the final result:

So much better!  I know it's a small thing, but at least I can sit on my sofa now without obsessing over the entry closet's sloppy appearance.  

Next up: hinges.  And buying vintage replacement knobs for the rest of the doors in the house.  And putting flooring in the bathroom, kitchen, and laundry area.  And renovating the third bedroom.  And gutting the kitchen.  And painting the guest room.  And putting up baseboard.  And tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow...