Those are probably two words you've never heard together. Allow me to explain. When we got the keys to the house, we noticed that it didn't really matter whether we had keys or not since the door to the garage did not lock. The sliding glass doors did not have a functioning lock, and the two broken locks made the front door lock irrelevant. Something had to be done.
I should mention here that since the first day in our house we have become Home Depot's number one customers. We already had a list going of the projects for which we could easily finish along with projects that needed to be completed in order for us to be happy/not robbed. Clearly the door lock situation was the latter.
So Sunday morning after we moved in we trooped off to Home Depot for what would be the first of many [expensive] trips. We purchased a myriad of things not limited to exterior lights, doorknobs and locks, caulk,window/door sealer, and tools (the tool thing will be another post entirely).
John put in a new fancy doorknob on the front door and added a deadbolt. The deadbolt mostly serves to create peace of mind since our only neighbors are potato farmers/horses, but I like it anyways. We also replaced the doorknob to the garage (it locks now, yay!) and the one to the basement, which also did not lock.
Putting in a doorknob is not too tricky. The holes were already there, with the exception of the deadbolt (which we'll get to in a minute) so all we really had to do was use a screwdriver to take off the old one and follow the directions for the new one. The entire doorknob process takes less than 5 minutes, and the hardest part is deciding which one you want (there are tons, make sure you get the kind for an exterior door for outside jobs).
The dead bolt wasn't too bad, but did require some tools. First, when you drill a hole in the door it makes a mess, we didn't mind vacuuming, but if you're especially concerned with wood shavings you may want to lay down a drop cloth or some newspapers. We also needed a drill with a hole saw attachment and a 1" spade bit, a tape measure, a screwdriver, a level and a pencil.
The process:
1. Use the tape measure to determine the height of the deadbolt. Remember to take into account the distance from the existing doorknob, we went with 6 inches to make it easy. Once we had our six inch mark, we measured from there to the bottom of the door and wrote the measurement down.
 |
| Measure twice, cut once! |
 |
| Using the hole saw. |
3. This part is tricky. Center your hole saw around the original mark you made and drill your hole. We hit some trouble here since it turns out our front door has a metal sheath over the wood and we had to stop and acquire a hole saw attachment that would drill through metal and not just wood.
4. Open the door, measure the width of your door (the space between the side you see when its closed and the side you'd see from the front). Make a dot directly in the middle, in line with the mark you made earlier on the door.
5. Using the spade bit, put the very tip on the dot and drill until you break through into the hole you drilled earlier.
6. You'll have to follow the same procedure to drill into the jamb where you originally made the mark with the level. Drill into that dot about 1 1/2"
7. From here on out, its mostly the same as putting in a new doorknob, and there are directions. If you measured carefully and made sure everything was level, you should be set!
 |
| Ta-Da! I made him pose like this. |
**I should mention... There's a tool (John says "I believe its called 'Amateur Hour'") at Home Depot for $30 that is specifically for installing deadbolts and would allow you to skip all of this, but if you're handy and careful, its fun to do these things on your own!
We did get interrupted once when the new neighbors stopped by with homemade bread and jam!
 |
| Yum! Neighborly goodness! |
No comments:
Post a Comment