I love taking old things and giving them a new life...old furniture, architecture, my husband.
Ok, that last one was completely uncalled for, he's not old at all, although he and I
both are feeling a little long in the tooth these days!
I was determined that we should find an old door to use as our front door, and re-purpose it. One Sunday a few weeks ago we headed up to St. Jacob's to do just that, at an architectural salvage store. On the way though, we stopped at the Aberfoyle flea market to see if our favourite vendor had anything to offer. He did, a set of double doors, in pretty rough shape, for $475 for both. Although it seemed like a pretty good deal, we wanted to see what St. Jacob's had to offer so off we went up there to check (while I tend to act--and shop--impulsively, Rod is the complete opposite and prefers to shop around and think about things. He has learnt, though, that when it comes to flea markets, one has to act quickly because that great bargain likely won't be there the following week). In St. Jacob's, they didn't have any suitable doors, nor did they have any double doors like the ones we had found at Aberfoyle. We asked the owner if they ever came across any, and he said that they were pretty rare, and if they did ever get any in, the stores in Toronto and area usually snapped them up. He was glad to give us their names though if we wanted to check them out. I asked him how much the stores in Toronto generally sold the double doors for, and he said they ranged from $1500 to $2000. We couldn't get out of there fast enough, mostly to get back to Aberfoyle before it was too late but also because as he was talking to us about double doors he somehow managed to drop the F-bomb into the conversation which, surprisingly, offended our very delicate sensibilities.
We raced back to Aberfoyle, all prepared to negotiate for the doors, which we ended up getting for a never-before-heard-of bargain price of $450. Yes, we are the KINGS of bargaining!
It IS a good deal though, I think. They had some inserts in them, in the Queen Anne style, which we promptly removed to make them a bit more simple and Colonial. We also removed the horrible, bitter green paint. The bottoms of the doors are a bit rotted, but that's okay because we have to cut off two inches anyway. God...looking at this picture, I think we must have been a little crazy:
This is the inside of the door; we preferred the simple look of the bottom panel:
Another view of the outside of the other door. The bottom is in a little better shape on this one:
You can't see it in the pictures, but these doors had some interesting hardware on them. The back plate that a doorknob would have sat against (long since gone) was still attached to the door, and covered with the green paint. We removed it and boiled it in vinegar to remove most of the paint, grime, and tarnish, and then finished it off with a few rubdowns with Brasso. After nearly passing out from the vinegar fumes, it came out great! After a bit of internet research, we found out that it was produced by the Eastlake hardware company, circa 1887, and the pattern is called Broken Leaf.
That's a picture I got from eBay (the middle picture), I don't have a picture on my camera of it yet. That little door thingy under the keyhole hides another keyhole. On the inside of the door, there was another, smaller keyhole cover, pictured in the smaller picture above, just underneath the left doorknob. That picture includes pretty much everything we've got for the door; although it came with the two keyhole covers, the mortise lock was beyond repair (and the cause of a sprained ankle trying to remove it!) and what hinges there were were also rusted and broken. Luckily, thanks to Charleston Hardware Company on eBay, we were able to come up with matching reproduction doorknobs, a rosette back plate for inside the door, hinges, and a mail slot--not in the Broken Leaf pattern, but similar in style. We also got a mortise lock for only $48 thanks to Rod, who wouldn't let me get the $130 one that was in perfect condition. The cheaper one worked out great with some boiling vinegar, Brasso, and penetrating oil. The reason we got a mail slot was because after stripping off the paint we saw that there had been one at one time, so we thought it would be nice to put one back in to give the Jehovah's Witnesses somewhere to drop off their Watchtower leaflets when we're pretending not to be home. We'll have to add a deadbolt to the door though, as we've no key for the mortise lock.
Today we painted the doors a couple of coats of Sherwin Williams Roycroft Copper Red; I think one more coat should do it. We also picked up the glass from Grimsby Glass, a bargain at $49 for both pieces. We'd like some of that glass that's ever-so-slightly wavy antique glass, but it's hard to find any that isn't obviously wavy and seeded. We just want it to be subtle, so for now we've just gone with regular glass. Here are the doors so far; we just sort of popped the doorknob and back plate in to get an idea of how it will look:
We're very excited! You can just see in the door on the left where the mail slot used to be. We'll be painting the inside of the doors our trim colour, Stucco by Sherwin Williams. The door on the left, although definitely able to open and shut, will be kept shut and in place by floor and ceiling bolts, called cremones. We still have to find some decent ones; the ones that came in the door were immovable from all the rust. All in all, we figure the doors will end up costing us around $800 when all is said and done. Worth it, I think.
Our colour scheme for the exterior of the house (we've decided to paint the siding, since it's fairly new and we really can't afford to replace it. It's a pretty boring colour though) is pictured below. We used the Sherwin Williams paint colour visualiser, finding the most similar house to ours. We had to 'paint' the shutters the same colour as the siding, as we won't have shutters and wanted them to blend in in the visualiser:
We had to find a colour scheme that went with our brown roof, which is also fairly new and can be neither painted nor replaced, unfortunately...no matter how much I pine for cedar shingles on the roof (sigh). Haha--"pine" for cedar shingles. I didn't mean to write that, honest! Anyway, we thought this looked sort of old-ish. Rod keeps looking at houses with white trim, and although I think white trim always looks nice, it seems so overdone and sort of a timid cop-out. We bought the paint and tried out a bit on the house, and although the "Roycroft Pewter" looks great, the "Weathered Shingle", which is the trim colour, DOES actually look a bit like baby poo. Sometimes it's hard to tell on a six-inch square painted patch though, so we're going to paint one side of the house and see how it looks. If it still looks like something my absolutely adorable grand-nephew Graham left in his diaper, we'll have to look for a softer beige, perhaps. As long as it ties in the brown roof.
Speaking of the adorable Graham, I have to share:
I have to say, I love him even more than my new doors.
