Oh hey there.

Welcome back to another update on our Fall 2021 One Room Challenge!

In case you missed the previous weeks’ updates, click below to get caught up.

• Week 1
• Week 2
• Week 3
• Week 4

Which brings us to today–fixing the bathroom door.

Now, you may be saying to yourself, “a door on a bathroom is very important, how have they lived in this house for two and a half years with a broken door?” Never fear–the door has been functional, but not easy to use and terribly inconvenient.

How is this the only photo I took of the old door hardware? It was truly that unremarkable, I guess.

For some reason, this door doesn’t match the rest of the doors in our house, which isn’t really that surprising, considering our house is 95 years old and has been through many, many renovations over the years. We’re pretty sure this wasn’t a bathroom until more recently, and assume someone must have added it here when the house was renovated back into a single family home from a duplex.

We wanted to update the knob to match some of the other crystal and brass knobs in the house, but most of all we just wanted the door to shut without having to latch it. Before, in order to keep the door shut while you went about your business, you had to push it shut and latch it to make sure it didn’t creak open. Not a big issue for two adults living in a house with a dog, but it does become an issue for kids and kid visitors who either can’t reach the latch or who might get stuck in the bathroom and not be able to get out. It also made it so that when guests stayed with us, if one of them wanted the door shut while using a blow dryer, another guest couldn’t come in to brush their teeth.

Relatively minor issues, but we figured that while we were renovating the bathroom, we might as well address it all.

In order to fix the issue of the door staying shut without being locked, our first thought was to install a regular doorknob (since the one installed was a dummy knob). However, there was too wide a spread between the door frame and doorknob, and without changing the door or seriously modifying the door frame, that wouldn’t work.

Our next idea was to use another dummy knob and a ball catch so that the door would stay shut but could be pushed open. This was the winning combo, so Jonny got a simple ball catch from Home Depot and I ordered this recreation unlacquered brass and crystal dummy knob set and this simple 2″ unlacquered brass latch to make the current door and door frame situation work.

Jonny patched up the original door knob holes and installed the new hardware. As you can see, the unlacquered brass is already starting to age, so it’ll match the other brass backplates in our house in no time. Lastly, Jonny found this cute little brass “bathroom” sign and installed it at the center of the door.

Now we have a fully functioning door that stays shut and a knob that goes with the rest of the house. Such a simple update, but very impactful for the day-to-day use of this space.

For videos, watch my Instagram stories here.

See you next week for another update!

♥

Grace