Double door bling

Sometimes it's the little things. As I've mentioned, whenever I can look at something in our new house, and say, done!-- I get ecstatic. The vision lines up with the reality. I do a happy dance. Before this weekend, I thought that phenomenon applied to light fixtures, paint colors, maybe furnishing choices... but door knobs? Apparently so.

The double doors divide what we call the great room from what we call the sitting room. Why just have a "living room" when you can call it something crazy? Anyway, these doors are gorgeous, it goes without saying. But they came sans door knobs. Well. That's an easy enough fix, with a lucky strike at the antique store and ten minutes with a screwdriver.

(For locals-- check Old, Odd, and Unique first, and Charlie Brown's second, for antique hardware like this.)

At least, it should've been ten minutes. One door knob was cooperative, and slid right into place. The other one had been bastardized a bit. In place of a screw holding it onto the stem (metal doohickey that connects one door knob to the other) it had a nail. No problemo, right? Just yank out the nail and you're in business. In theory.

In practice, yanking out the nail involved three pairs of pliers, a hammer, lithium grease, and a lot of impassioned pounding. Eventually there was triumph. For just twenty bucks total, our lovely double doors have bling. I love easy projects like this.

The moral of the story: If you buy an antique door knob, don't buy one held together by a nail. Good advice.