Our 120 year old home has some wonderful old features, and four sets of these lovely cedar doors are some of my favorites. When we bought the house they had been cleaned and restored, but had no hardware! And since three bedrooms need their privacy, we had been looking for the appropriate type of hardware.
It’s hard to find hardware that would look right on these doors. We didn’t want to use normal locksets & handles since we didn’t want more keys to keep track of (that’s a whole other story) or to have to use top and bottom bolts on the doors. They’re so tall you’d have to get the ladder to open the top bolt!
There’s a hardware store here that had a line of hardware we liked, and we inquired about it a number of times, being told endlessly that the shipment would arrive in “fifteen days.” After a number of times we finally realized that in México, “fifteen days” means either “I don’t know when” or “forget about it” or something in between.
When I was up North this summer I went to Rejuvenation in Seattle. There I was able to find elusive casement window hardware as well as the door hardware of my dreams. Well, almost, I guess, it could be a little bigger. If you’re in the market for hardware, they told me they will ship to Mexico, but you should call to order.
I really like the mechanism. Very simple, keeps the dogs off the beds, and the air conditioning in. Fifteen days? More like three hundred!
Jonna
October 27, 2008Those are beautiful doors! Really exquisite. I like the hardware you got, it is simple and goes perfectly with the doors. Resurrection Hardware is a great store, we had one in Marin and I would drool over some of their stuff.
Here’s a door story from our house. Every door in the house has a key and every single key is different! There must be 20 of them. I told them that I had no desire to emulate a janitor carrying all those keys around. No problem, the locksmith is coming to change them all to one key. Maybe in 15 days. 😉
The other story is that ours have those iron bars the slide up into a ring on the top and the bottom. The bars for the top must have been made a standard size without checking or thinking much. We would have needed a medium sized ladder to reach them! They took them all away and longer ones that we can reach came back in about … 15 days.
Anyway, I also love the stain on your doors. I like that lighter color a lot. I think they get slap happy with the stain down here too often. Less is more.
American Mommy in Mexico
October 27, 2008Doors are lovely and you did great job with hardware!