How we all started on The Door

This is, of course, the carved, solid-wood front door that I bought at the Daughter Unit’s urging last weekend at the neighborhood estate sale. Said door was one of the items crammed into the house formerly owned by an elderly couple with hoarding issues. The estate sale managers told us that they had to fill and empty an industrial dumpster three times, just to get to the sellable stuff. Which, as it was all crammed together in a dingy, airless and dark house, did not show off at it’s very best; honestly, there were some rather nice items available, but a lot looked like several aisles worth of the Dollar Store jumbled in with random contents of the marked-down shelves at Walmart. The blanc de chine lamp was one of the random nice ones – the door was another. It’s some kind of oriental sycamore wood, with four inset panels carved with a sort of lotus and leaf design. It was completely unfinished, and never had been installed.

The center ornament of The Door

My daughter called our next-door neighbor as soon as I had paid for it: he has a pickup truck, and I think feels rather guilty about how his basset hounds sometimes start barking in the middle of the night. Anyway, he came at once – so did the guy who does all kinds of neighborhood handiwork. All agreed that it was a very nice door – albeit heavy enough to require two or three persons to lift and carry. Well, we had planned and budgeted to replace the front door this year, but some piece of contractor  leftover from the Habitat for Humanity retail store was what we originally had in mind. The day after we bought it, the Daughter Unit and I set to with steel wool and a bucket of polyurethane varnish; three coats to the front, two on the back, and oh, my – did it come out well. There is a thin veneer front and back, which looks very much like something called ‘lacewood’ – a kind of rippled gold and brown effect. The Daughter Unit fears that someone will break into the house someday and steal nothing but the door.

One of the carved panels

We did source a latch set from Habitat, anyway – I am almost certain that much of what we use for renovating and replacing certain elements of the house will come from there, if not the marked-down section from Home Depot or Lowe’s. A small bit of panic upon trying to assemble the latch set, when we realized that it was set for a left-hand side opening and not a right-hand one, which was what we needed. Nothing about this in the box, and instructions were there not: It also wasn’t returnable. The three of us – me, Daughter Unit and the neighborhood handyman finally figured out that we could disassemble the latch mechanism itself and convert it to what we needed.

The Door – Nearly done!

Oh, and the existing threshold needed to go, as well as the inside door trim, but we had pretty well written that off. Of course now the danger is that this bit of renew-replacement will make everything else look tatty. I’m almost a hundred percent certain that we are due for another inside paint job…