Doorknob debacle

After a last minute flight to beat the east coast snow storm, I am back home in Virginia. While I was sad to leave my family and have my time cut short, I'm glad to be home with the hubs, my pups...and you! Virginia was hit with a whopping 10 or so inches of snow, which is a lot for the area! Our little family has weathered the storm with lots of outdoor fun, puzzles, yummy food, Dexter, and home projects. There's nothing like a little cabin fever to get us off our bottoms and start tackling projects that we've been putting off. Number one on our list: changing doorknobs.

Changing the knobs in our home is something I've wanted to do since we moved into our nest. I bought the knobs about four months ago and haven't handled them since. Well, my friends, today was the day to change our knobs. Today was also a day that would test the strength of my marriage as this project quickly took a turn for the worst (yes, I'm going to see how many door knob puns I can throw into this post).

The knobs in our house were brassy, old, and covered in paint. I purposely covered them in paint when I painted the doors so that I had extra ammunition to tell the hubs I wanted to change them. I'm sneaky like that.

Before we could change the doorknobs, it was out with the old! This put a new twist in our story. You see, it took over 10 minutes to pry that stinkin' plate off of the door. We also damaged the door quite a bit with all of the poking and prodding. What's more was once we popped off the plate, we could not fit our screwdriver to remove the screws because the plate was in the way. This called for bending the metal with some cutters.

This worked until the screw came out so far that it hit the bent metal and we could not twist it anymore. I came up with the brilliant idea to cut the screw and then hand turn it. The hubs jumped at the chance to use a power tool and quickly grabbed his sawzall. He cut that blasted screw, which resulted in a bent screw. Now we had a screw with no head, bent, and stuck in the damaged door. It took a lot of hand twisting over the course of 5 or so minutes, but we managed to shout a few four letter words get the screw out.

It was after we got out the first screw, and were ready to fly off the handle, that we made a discovery. Did you know that in the 1960's doorknobs were constructed with a little button that popped off the knob to help make installation easier? Neither did we. Well, once we found that magic button, our nightmare was over. Installing the doorknob was easy!

From start to finish, changing our first doorknob took close to 45 minutes. Once we had knowledge of how to correctly remove a doorknob, the next three knobs were installed in less than 20 minutes. I know, we're dumb as doorknobs.

Anywho, here is our final product. Stay tuned for a tutorial in how to patch a door! Oops!

Now it's your turn! I want to hear about a time you had an easy project that was made difficult because of your lack of know how. Did you work it out? Did you bang your head into a wall like we did? Plus, six gold stars to whoever can find all of the doorknob puns in this post!