DI(Sort-of)Y

I like to think of myself as moderately handy.  I can change a tire and use a drill.  I assemble my own Ikea and Target furniture happily, and once I built some shelves (of my own design, even!) that were only kind of wobbly.  And I don't even need to mention the masterful caulking, spackling, and super-gluing that was holding my house together before we started the renovation.  Old houses take a lot of goo.  This renovation, however, has been strictly a pro job, from design through execution, which is  super good thing when I take an honest assessment of my tolerance for mess, stress, and hard work (virtually nil for all three).  I've not been sad that we're not doing it ourselves, especially since the dudes who are doing it are super, super awesome.

But I'm not someone who will reject a gift that falls in my lap, even if the gift is a little bit of work on a hot day.  That gift was the fun afternoon of doorknob wrangling that I mentioned last time.  And here's how that went.

Roughly four million old screws

So the deal was that I had a collection of doorknobs, spindles, escutcheons, hinges and screws that all came from different places, and I had to find a way to make them all look like they belonged together.  I could have just polished them all up, and I would have liked that, but some of my pieces had been "aged" (with a belt sander) by the lady who lived in my house before and THEN lacquered.  In order to make them shiny, I would have had to either strip them and then polish whatever brass was left, or strip them and then have them re-plated.  I like old stuff, but that was a bit much.  And I liked how they looked as they were, so I decided to make everything else match their level of old-ness.

So after sorting everything out,  I made them all clean and shiny.

I used hot water to get the last bits of paint off, then used toilet bowl cleaner (recommended by the dude at the antique store!) and some 0000 steel wool to clean everything up.   See how pretty these are shiny?  It was a little hard to do what I did next, but I was spurred on by something you might notice--though all that brass is lovely, it doesn't all match.  Some of my brass is "rosier" than others (look at that really pinkish one at the back right).  The Internet says that before the 60's there was no standard amount of copper included in brass even from the same manufacturers, so there's pretty wide variation in color.  I wouldn't mind the non-matchiness, myself, but I like where I ended up.  Stay with me.

I dropped each bit in something called "Brass Ager."  Truth in labeling, there.  I don't know what it is.  I googled the heck out of it, and I still don't know.  Here's what happened in about 30 seconds when I did that.

Shiny...Dark.  Magic.  Or chemistry.  You know.  But I wasn't going for super-dark "Oil-rubbed Bronze," so I used some more of my super-fine 0000 steel wool to back the finish off a bit.

And there you have it--matching finishes.

Here's some before and after, because nothing's better than that.  And here's some before and after on my hands, because I DID use proper gloves and safety equipment (until my hands got really sweaty and that was TOO gross to bear).  This did not wash off.  I had to get a manicure to cover my zombie nails, and even then it was a good week before all the skin on my hands PEELED off and looked kind of normal again.

But here's the after that matters:

Those are the doors to the library.  This room was built a few months ago. Those doors have only been hung for a few weeks.  But with those knobs, don't they look timeless?  Don't they look like they belong to the rest of the house?  I think they do.

And here's another knob on a door that requires a mortise:

That backplate is what I was trying to match.  And here's the other kind of knob.  We used all of those downstairs.  They're just so pretty it hurts.

Totally worth some peely fingers and black nails.