Do people actually like my posts on household projects, DIY and just basic all around chores? Okay don't answer that.
You get what you get and you don't get upset.
That's my new favorite saying by the way.
This time I'm painting and changing the handle on a door and installing a keyless lock. AND YOU WILL LIKE IT!
Okay so the door from our garage to our newly renovated mudroom has an old outdated handle on it that doesn't suit the space and the lock mechanism is a bit of a pain in that it requires a different key than the other doors in the house.
We don't lock the door often because it enters into the garage but we decided that we should probably start locking it regularly just to be safe. You cant trust anyone these days and I listen to too many crime podcast so in my mind there is always someone lurking outside that wants to put an axe through your skull... did I take it too far?
So anyway, we decided to go with a keyless lock for simplicity. I hate having to carry a bunch of keys around with me at all times and my wife convinced me of the ease of keyless so now I'm on board with it.
Given that this is an exterior door it has a metal layer surrounding the wooden core. I bought two hole saws that I would need (those things are figgin expensive by the way) and borrowed a corded drill from my inlaws to do the job.
I bought everything as a kit that came with this door handle and lock template thingy. It was only a slight up-charge from the price of the holes saws individually so it seemed worth it to me having never done this before. The hole saws were like $50 or something stupid if I bought them on their own and the kit all together was like $56.00 or so. So for simplicity - worth it.
The template basically just clamps to the door and lines things up where they need to be and then acts as a guide to get the holes started. Pretty easy really. Drilling through the metal part of the door was a bit of a challenge and I'm glad that I borrowed the electric drill because my crappy battery operated one wouldn't have been powerful enough to do the job.
Next I had to drill a 1" hole in the side of the door for the deadbolt portion of the lock.
The old handle was larger than the new one and it had left marks on the door in the old paint so I sanded down the ridges to hide it for when I painted the door a new color. I didn't do a good enough job though because the marks came through in the end. Dang it!
There were two screw holes from the handle as well that I couldn't get rid of. It's not a huge deal really. What can you do?
Next I had to chisel out the side of the door so that the plate would be flush and not stick out and/or catch on the door jam.
I don't know all of the terminology by the way, so apologies if I'm using the wrong labels and terms for things in this post. Hopefully the pictures clarify what I mean.
Here's a photo after I installed the deadbolt and painted everything.
Similarly, I replaced the counterpart portion on the door frame.
Next my wife installed the deadbolt and handle. She agreed to install that part because she had done it for our front door and knew what she was doing. I think that she did an excellent job with the installation in the end. The new handle is much more modern than the old outdated one as you can see. Unfortunately, the outdated ones are currently on every single door throughout our house, so that may be a project for down the road as well...
After the handles were on I painted the door black with some leftover paint that we had from another project. I may have painted the door first, I forget now. This picture is of the adjacent door that remained white in the end. Anyway, we toyed with the idea of painting the garage door green but we had the black paint on hand and never got around to getting the green paint - so black it is!
The black matches the black vinyl of the chair that we have in the room as well, so it ties in pretty nicely for that reason. The chair I'm referring to was shown in my Re-upholstery post.
Okay and now for some before and after photos.
Here are the two handles, old and new and below are the doors before and after.
The whole project took only a couple of hours all together. I had to wait for the paint to dry to apply a second coat but as far as work time goes it was maybe 3-4 hours in total. Worth it is the end I think.