How To Update Your Front Door?

As a member of the More Handles team, it would be deemed a very poor show if the first thing you would see as you approached my house, was a dreary looking front door!

As I recently made the purchase of our new little abode (to be closer to the best place to work at!) money can prove to be quite a problematic area. Although most things were accounted for, it was only upon closer inspection that I realised the front door was not fit for purpose!

So I took some timeout to look around and see what doors were available and I came across this little beauty from www.todd-doors.co.uk/stuttgart

Absolutely what I was looking for in all terms, design and colour and material. Solid oak in a contemporary design, I was enthralled with my find, however my husband unfortunately dampened my day and proceeded to remind me that sadly our budget would not allow for the extravagance at this moment in time. (Mental note made for future purposes!)

So looking again at the current hideous front door, back to the drawing board. OK let’s look at what I have to work with:

1)      15 glass panels, in a wooden frame door in awful colour

2)      A Victorian age keymaster with rust that obviously never met WD40

3)      The world’s most frustrating rim cylinder that chooses to work at will

4)      God only knows why a door knob that has no key and does not work and I’m still trying to understand its purpose!

5)       Rusted over sad looking covered escutcheon

Ok, so not too much then! This door has 2 good things going for it 1) the glass panes are intact and 2) the hinges aren’t that bad! Salvageable with a bit of elbow grease.

Updating Front Doors

At first I skipped home with these lovely passage door knobs, a shrill of excitement came over me, as the thought of my boys being able to enter the home without knocking each time and disrupting my sofa time!

https://www.morehandles.co.uk/zoo-fb202-architectural-ball-knob.html The Zoo Architectural Ball Knob in satin chrome FB202SC great to look at and seriously functional. Alas my glee was short lived, upon my return I picked up my screw driver and proceeded to remove the eyesore from my door, only to behold an almighty gaping hole, it was like a secret doorway to Narnia, the draught was horrendous!! Needless to say I quickly replaced the door knob and paused for thought.

Hiding my shame of lack of knowledge, I promptly returned to work and explained to the trade counter crew what had gone wrong. Not only were they empathetic they were very helpful in explaining everything I needed to do and what I needed. These guys really know their stuff!

So it seems what I need is a Weiser door knob set – this mechanism screws together to hold on the door as opposed to being screwed directly onto the door, the penny drops! So a few to choose from, however I will not deviate from my original choice so I opted for the Bala passage door knob Weiser style replacement set in satin stainless steel 6952 (as close a match to the satin chrome as possible) https://www.morehandles.co.uk/bala-door-knob-weiser-replacement-set.html

I now have the correct door knob, would it be too soon to resume the glee? Let’s keep that on hold for now. So the next item would be the latch. Although from the picture it seems reasonable, I have decided that my time would be better spent doing other things as opposed to be left standing on the door step attempting to persuade the key to turn in the latch a few times prior to the door actually being able to open. Let’s not talk about the penny wedged behind the latch either! Your guess is as good as mine! Therefore the latch must go.

In keeping with my finish trend for the door I opted for the Rim Cylinder Night Latch in satin chrome (standard 60mm) RCN8260SC https://www.morehandles.co.uk/rim-cylinder-night-latch-rcn8240.html

And my final purchase for the door would be the escutcheon. I managed to impress my husband at this point (a very rare treat these days) by advising the correct item required in this instance would be a euro profile covered escutcheon instead of the standard he was suggesting. Again, in-keeping with the door hardware trend I opted for a Euro Profile Round Covered Escutcheon in satin chrome https://www.morehandles.co.uk/croft-hardware-round-escutcheon-euro-profile.html (on hold as I’m deciding as to whether to keep this lock or not)

Now I’m fully armed with my door hardware, the next step is to turn my attention to the actual door itself. The door itself does not appear to be able to withstand a good old deep sanding treatment to return back to wood colour, so in this instance I purchased a satin grey colour for exterior doors.

The work started pretty much straight away.

I started by removing all the door hardware and masking the glass panes. Any excess masking was removed with a blade for an accurate taping. Once all taped up I proceeded to sand the whole thing down, as previously mentioned, the sanding could not be done with an electrical sander as the door would definitely fall to pieces! So it took some time but managed to remove the bubbled previous job and made an even layer ready for paint. I followed the pattern of the door – vertical sides, horizontal tops and continued with this when doing the outer panes. The result is not half bad, if I may say so myself.

It required 2 coats but was very fast drying. I also found a neat little trick to remove the odd stains of the previous disastrous paint job, nail polish remover, it worked a treat and also polished the glass panes nicely. While waiting for the whole door to complete its final drying process I removed the tape as removing the tape after drying could potentially peel off the paint I had just done. Then it was time for a lovely cup of tea which also allowed time for instruction pamphlet reading.

Tea down and pamphlet reading complete I pick up the required tools and set back to work (translation – made another cup of tea while watching husband put on the door hardware) and here is the end result:

To Buy a New Door or To Update Old Front Door?

Ta dah, and thank you 🙂