The doors…
In 1948, they were solid wood. None of this hollow core stuff. On the flip side, standardization hadn’t quite struck nationwide yet. They also could vary a bit more since a solid wood door could be trimmed to fit, even if it needed a LOT of trimming.
With that said, I really don’t have a lot of complaints about our doors, other than we have not yet found the door that originally went between the kitchen and dining room.
So what was so special about it?
It swung on a pin inserted in the floor and top of the door frame. I guess it was made so that it was easy to carry food to the dining room for lil Mrs. Betty Crocker. Okay, there’s a snarky remark. I’d just been thinking about Edith Bunker a bit lately. She was a 1948 style bride, in the early 197os. I am so NOT a 1948 style bride, and even my mother wasn’t. Granted, I waited later than most to find my perfect match, and I’m happy as a clam as a wife now, but…
I can’t imagine life as a downtrodden doormat of a wife, forever forced to be subordinate to a husband, without the ability to even have an opinion unless he gave me one to have. I cannot imagine being a baby factory, dishwasher, cook, supplier of sex on demand, and general step & fetch it. That wasn’t the life for me, and it’s a good thing that I didn’t arrive until after women’s lib had taken a grip on the country. It’s tough enough to be from somewhere else and move to small town, Mississippi, where time has slowed to a crawl and they finally outlawed slavery in 2013. Things do not change quickly here, for whatever reason.
Including doors.
Our 1948 doors are all in good condition. So is the hardware. The first thing we did was violate all 3 exterior doors and install deadbolts and modern door knobs. IF you ever are going to do such a thing, we bought a kit that included the jig to do the drilling. It eliminates errors and speeds the process up to about a 5 minute chore per door, and compared to the amount of room for potential error there is, along with the previous time investment, that little jig will save you an immense amount of time and prevent ruining a door, even if you have never drilled one before. (We bought ours at Lowe’s. I suspect all of the big box hardware/lumber stores have one.)
They were all painted with a gloss paint, but a very long time ago. From the looks of it, they were only repainted once, with the exception of the kitchen door, which appears to still be the original unpainted wood. I guess that was done to match the kitchen cabinets. That isn’t a “blonde” look like was so popular around the same time, but the more natural yellowish look of birch. It’s still quite attractive, actually. The two doors that need repainted due to plain old aging are the other two exterior doors. All of the interior doors need repainting just to update their look, ranging from barfy depressing green to ancient yellow and on over to yellowed off-white. We have removed the hardware from one of the master bedroom doors (it has 2–one to the hallway and one to the kitchen–go figure?) but we haven’t gotten it painted yet. One of the doors on the room destined to be our home office has some issues with its hinges. It’s had a very hard life, apparently, and the bottom hinge has been ripped out of the door frame. Greg hasn’t rehung the door, which I gather will mean resetting the hinge in a different location on the door to deal with the stripped out screws and damage to the frame. If it was entirely up to me, I’d fill the holes with wood putty, screw it into place, using a shim to hold the door until the wood putty could set up properly, and call it good. I know from past experience…the wood putty cure often will last decades. I guess that is what comes from being a single mom and always fixing something though–I learned the quick & easy method for moms instead of the “right way” to fix things. I don’t gripe too much though–until I am confronted with trying to open that door with only a top hinge holding it. It’s a nightmare, and a solid door is NOT a lightweight thing to maneuver. After months, I just started having my “fit” about it, telling him to either take the door off or rehang it. Since we’re still repainting the office (yes, I know we are slow, but remember…we’re not spring chickens, and we do have a lot of other things on our plate too) taking it down might not be such a bad idea. It would be easier to repaint it if it was on saw horses instead of hinges.
I’m currently planning on repainting all of the doors with gloss white paint, regardless of the color of the trim in the room. So far, the office is the only room I’m not planning on white trim though. It’s getting a light beige trim in the same color as the pinstripes on the wall will be. Even if the closest I’ve come to pinstriping has been to buy the tape to do it with.
My plan is to take the tape, running it in vertical strips from ceiling to mop boards, leaving about 1/4″ between two strips. The distance, right now, is intended to be randomly generated, although I may opt for more precise placement by the time we get there. I have to wait a week for this project after I get the second (and final) coat of semi gloss white on the walls.
Why so long? It’s simple. I want the paint cured well before I adhere the tape to it. I know how fast we work. I am figuring that it will take me a day to tape a wall, and there are four walls. Painting won’t take that long–the intention is to use a small brush, and as a crafter, I have plenty of options there. A single coat should do the stripes just fine, if it’s applied evenly. When I peel that tape off, I don’t want it to bring any of the white paint with it. I’d cry if it did. Therefore, at least a week after the paint job is done will ensure the paint has cured well. Even if we’re in the super paint mode (for us, that is) we still have plenty of other tasks to accomplish during that week, with the window, doors, door frames and mop boards to paint. The new shade on the window also needs attached. I need to come up with a new window treatment for the door’s window as well.
We’ve been concerned about the probability of lead paint in the house. The saving grace has been the fact that it was not painted often, which means there isn’t flaking paint or multiple layers to worry about. The most recent layer was applied post-lead paint (we have the cans, with the liquid paint in them, so we know what it was–Sears paint. They loved Sears, it seems!) That means only the first layer was from the leaded era. Thankfully, it’s not chipping and peeling.
So, we’re off and running with our doors, but at least, it’s not scissors, right? Our major concern right now is wiring. We’ve had continual problems with a Green Acres-like electrical issue, resulting in frequently flipped breakers. Rewiring is critical, and while Greg has explained the fishing tape and how it works numerous times, until I see it in action, I don’t really have a good mental grasp of it being very efficient or probable that we’re going to be able to run the new wire in the walls without a major nightmare. He is worried about the cost, and I’m worried about the amount of labor. I guess I have become resigned to being house-poor for years to come. It’s the trade off–we could be broke from a mortgage we can’t afford or we can be broke doing repairs we can’t afford.
The dining room door is something we hoped we’d find stashed somewhere. The previous owners threw almost nothing away, including old parts from their previous electric oven. I was sure it was stashed in the workshop, which was a jumbled mess of old screws, bits of wire, ancient Christmas decorations, and everything else under the sun. So far, we’ve not found it. (It’s still a jumbled mess–we were in too much of a hurry to move in so we could get to work on the house.) If we don’t find it, we have found a number of dealers with a stock of old doors from tear downs and remodels. They are also not incredibly expensive, and we may actually find a swivel-on-pins door among their stock. I’ve even thought about buying a trio of old doors to use to create a portable screen in the office–we’d rather not have casual callers have a line-of-sight on expensive office equipment (expensive for us, anyhow). We follow the theory that if potential thieves don’t know we have something worth stealing, they won’t bother with our house. We also have a security camera we’re going to install to monitor traffic onto our carport (and the office door) and will get a another one to use at the other two doors.
So, it’s still a case of work work work and we owe we owe and back to work we go, right? Sometimes though, I wish we had “seven dwarves” willing and able to come and help us with projects.
