Gobbling Not Necessary

One of our weekend home projects was to replace the exterior door knobs and locks on our house. The primary reason for doing this is the older door knobs were nasty. The finish was worn off the door knobs and they looked decrepit. The door knob at the back of the house was covered with some sort of black gunk which I always imagined to be death mold. I doubt it was actual death mold, but that’s not the mental image you want to conjure as your moving food in and out to the grill.

Of course there is also the added bonus of getting to change the locks at the same time. We didn’t change the locks when we moved into the house. From all neighbor accounts the previous owner’s ex-wife is a raving lunatic. It nice to know that there is now 0% chance of finding her (or the previous own for that matter) in the house one day because they discovered an old key and decided to take a look.

At Lowes I got a really helpful employee who claimed he used to be a locksmith. He dropped some door knob related knowledge that I suspect Dawn and I would have learned the hard way. Namely, that the door knob manufacture we were looking at made their knobs such that they turn freely on the inside even when locked. Meaning you can lock the door then come back later and freely open the door and then close it behind you only to discover you just locked yourself out. He recommended using the passive door knobs below and relying on the deadbolts for actual security. The upshot is you actually have to use a key to lock the door….so you can never lock yourself out.
Replacing the locks was a breeze, although I did have to drill a new hole in our front door for the new fancy handle. I had a little bit of trepidation on that count. It’s not like you can un-drill a hole in a steel door… or even really patch it. It’s pretty much new door time. However, measure 57 times and drill once seemed to work out in the end.

One of the cool side benefits of replacing the locks is the knowledge that I actually made it tougher to kick down our doors. I don’t actually know anyone who has had their place broken into by a master thief who picked the locks. I do know of a couple of situations where someone simply kicked in the door. The fancy lock doesn’t really help if someone kicks the door. The point that fails is the metal bracket attached to the doorframe that the deadbolt slides into. That metal bracket wasn’t being held on by much with the older locks. Check out how much beefier the new screws are that hold the bracket on.


Of course now that we have pretty new exterior door knobs they just make the interior door knobs looks ugly. The exterior ones are brushed satin nickel finish, the interior ones are crappy cheapo brass finish. Looks like I need to find a contractor pack of nickel door knobs so I can go through the house and replace the all of the other knobs.