The whole rhyme applies, you guys. I'm wrangling hardware for the house, and old, new, borrowed, and blue actually all apply. I've read that the tradition as applied to marriage helps connect the new bride though the institution of marriage to her ancestry (old), her future (new), her community (borrowed), and the creativity it takes to make a marriage work (blue) OR the sorrow attendant any life, you know, if you want to get all depressing about it. And we have all four in our hardware choices--entirely unintentional, but no mean feat.
I've told you about the doorknob store. I didn't mention that while I'm choosing brand-shiny-new doorknobs for the exterior doors (the better to thwart crooks, my dear), I'm using old knobs for the interior doors. Before the contractors smashed parts of our house to bits, they kindly took the interior doors off of the hinges and saved them and the hardware to use again. I knew I wouldn't have enough doorknobs and hinges to manage all of the doors for the new house. My nice contractors also explained to me that the hinges I had (they have ball finials, or top-bits) were old and hard to match, and that if I wanted to use old doorknobs, they'd probably have mortises, which are boxes that fit into a space inside the door that contain all of the twisty and lock-y bits. And while they'd be glad to help me source standard stuff, I'd be on my own for finding antiques. I wandered around antique stores, as I'm apt to do, but doorknobs in good condition are expensive as well as hard to find.
Enter my sister-in-law's parents, the heroes of this tale. Mr. and Mrs. C had a box of glass doorknobs, with all of the mortises and escutcheons (which are the flat bits that are the pretty parts behind the doorknob on the outside of the door) that they had rescued from an old house years ago. Y'all, they let me have them, and now I have beautiful glass doorknobs for my house. I can't even wrap my mind around how wonderful this is.
So now I had a box of old hardware from my house that my contractors kept, and a box of old hardware that Mr. and Mrs. C sent me, so of course I emailed my contractor and asked when he wanted all of it. He told me I'd better do some wrangling first; put together clean and working hinges, mortise, knobs, spindles (the rod between the two knobs) and escutcheons for each door and deliver them to him ready to go. Eep! I know that cleaning and matching old hardware isn't exactly standard house-building work, but I'm for sure no expert.
He did send me to a nice dude at a nice antique place who helped me put everything in order. And while the nice dude was not interested in cleaning and refinishing my hardware, he did teach me how. Tomorrow I'll wander over to the house, bag of chemicals (from Home Depot that make me feel like I belong in an episode of Breaking Bad) in hand, to scrub and polish and age all of the metal bits so they look like they belong together. I'm both terrified and excited, and if I don't die from the fumes you'll get a nice DIY entry for once.
So there's your old, for the knobs and hinges that lived in my house from 1914 until this Spring. And new, for the shiny deadbolts from the store that should be called Wall-o-Doorknobs. Borrowed covers the beautiful glass knobs from my family's family, though I do think they're letting me keep them. Blue could cover the glass knobs as well, as my antique doorknob guy was excited to tell me that my knobs were the rich, sparkly glass made with manganese and lead, rather than the crystal clear selenium glass made after about 1915. These manganese knobs will change color with lots of exposure to the ultraviolet radiation of the sun and turn "sun purple," a pretty lavender shade that some collectors love and some abhor, believing it's ruined the original piece. That's not my blue, though.
I could have blue for the interior paint that's going up inside the house:
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| "Jetstream" for boys |
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| "Jubilee" in the library and master bath |
(Here's some pink, too, just because):
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| "Loveable" for girls |
Not only does my nice antique place have a doorknob guru, they also have tons of old and reproduction glass cabinet knobs, and some of those, for sure, and blue-milk glass, which I'm going to put in the laundry room. Blue glass knobs, for whimsy or sorrow, put the cap on the blessing I hope for my house. Now I only have about 90 more knobs to pick and source, but the important part is clearly handled.
Bonus Post Script:
Look at the attic of this antique store that's in an old house. It's the greatest. Go here if you're ever in Houston.
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