Doors

Something I love about old houses: they have a lot of doors and windows.

This house has six external doors which need locks.

• Front door
• Rumpus room
• Garage door (car size) plus door from garage into house (human size)
• Library
• Living room
• Sun room.

And a large number of internal doors: 22, including three sets of sliding wooden doors on closets and one enormous sliding glass door on the wall of glass.

Fun facts about the keys:

1. Two of them are on the same lock: the front door and the living room door.
2. We don't have keys for three doors: library, garage, and rumpus.  There's a note from the sellers that suggests they didn't have keys to some of these either, but they did have keys to others.
3. We have 8 (!) front door keys and 1 sun room key.  
4. We have 5 random keys that don't open any door (!) I gave one of them to the pre-schooler because he loves keys. 
5. Some of the doors lock by pushing a button.  Others by turning a button.
6. Some of the buttons stay locked after you open the door.  Some of them unlock on opening.
7. Relatedly, the odds of us getting locked out of the house or forgetting to lock all of the house are high.

All but three of the hinged doors are solid wood with 5" doorknob sets: 

The library door to the upper patio.

This is unusual.  Standard is a 2-3/8" set. It's a subtle shift that took me several visits to notice.  

(The oddballs are the exterior doors for the sun room and rumpus room, and the door to the artists' studio -- none of these are original doors.)

The outsides of the external doors have seen a lot of weathering:

Front door, outer side, while open.

 You can see how the border of the door is a honey yellow where it was shaded by the weatherstripping, but the bulk of the door is darker.  The bottom strip is very dark -- possibly from radiated heat on the metal screen door?

Also, the front door has a bird door knocker.  Someone already put a bird on my house.

(Ignore the lockbox from the realtor -- he's taking it back soon.)

Detail of same.

The varnish is all crazed.  It's still attached firmly, but brittle and shrunken. Feels a bit like bark.  The light strip on the side is still shiny and smooth.   All the inner doors (and inner faces of outer doors) are still shiny and smooth, too.