Upgrade doors with quick hardware swap
Sometimes it’s hard to believe we moved into our builder-basic house in the fall of 2011 — about seven-and-a-half years ago. We’ve changed so much since then, the house is practically unrecognizable.
Well, until I turn around and see a leftover “basic” feature, like the thin=ribbed carpet (yuck) or the boob-style ceiling lights we have yet to replace.
One of the most ho-hum features of our house was the door knobs: plain globes of brushed nickel. No matter how you painted the walls — and believe me, we’ve painted almost every room two to three times — there they were, inoffensive, but undeniably basic.
So when Schlage asked if I wanted to try replacing them with ones that actually suited our modern farmhouse decorating style, I did a little doorway happy dance. I’d always loved the contrasting look of white doors with black door knobs and backplates — oh, how I loved the look of backplates.
I immediately picked out the Georgian knob with Camelot trim in a matte black finish, knowing it would pop gorgeously against our white doors and mostly neutral wall colours. We needed the locking Bed & Bath versions for the bedrooms and bathrooms, and Hall & Closet versions for the linen closet, our bedroom closet and the basement closet.
I dove into the boxes when they arrived, a little surprised by the intricacies of each knob set. I guess I hadn’t ever looked at the inside of a door knob before. Luckily, all it took was a single screwdriver to remove our old knobs and install the gorgeous new ones.
I started with our master bedroom closet by unscrewing the two tiny screws on the back of the existing knob. Then it was just a matter of sliding out the two knobs — outside and inside — leaving the latch-y stick that keeps the door shut. It slipped out easily once the knobs were removed, and then two tiny screws removed its face plate.
It was strange seeing the door with nothing in it except holes. Then it was time to work backwards, essentially, and do all of those steps in reverse to install the new knobs. I slipped the new latch-y stick (latch bolt) in through the side of the door and then screwed the new black faceplate over it to secure it in place. Then I held the inside and outside knobs on either side of the door, clicked their insides together through the main hole, and added the tiny black screws to secure the inside knob to the mechanisms inside.
Interesting, there aren’t any extra steps involved if you choose a knob set with a chunky backplate — it’s installed just the same as any knob. But I quickly realized the thing about backplates is that they need to be lined up carefully so they’re perfectly straight.
Since the edge of the backplate is less than two inches from the edge of the door, it’s very obvious if they’re installed crookedly — which my first one was! Luckily, it’s quick to fix if you notice it’s a bit off.
Before I moved on to the final step — swapping the old brushed nickel strike plate with the new matte black one, using two more tiny screws — I just admired how stately the black knobs and backplates looked against the crisp white. The effect was gorgeous.
I enlisted Handy Husband to install the rest of the knobs while I returned to work, but I was giddy going around the house after they were all in place. I kept snapping pictures of the identical knobs in different rooms, just to see how beautifully the black finish worked against the different paint colours.
I loved it against the bright yellow door of my DIY studio in the basement, I loved it against the soft mauve paint in our daughter’s room, and I loved it against the grey/beige Revere Pewter paint that’s in many of our rooms and hallways.
The matte black finish is perfect against our white doors — classic and dramatic, but simple — and the backplates make our home feel more upscale. Yes, something as simple as a door knob can really make that much of a difference.
I would compare this “door makeover” to going years putting your photos in nothing but cheap plastic frames, and suddenly upgrading to beautiful, heavy wooden frames with thick, cream-coloured mats. A single screwdriver, six screws and about two minutes — that’s all it took per knob. It may sound like a small change no one would notice, but it has the power to completely elevate the feel of your home.