You are currently browsing the tag archive for the 'front door' tag.
Those of you who have been following along know that certain parts of our front porch were scrapped or chopped down. Well, after trying and failing to find a local woodworking shop that would make reproductions for us, we tried a Michigan outfit, J.J Wohlfert’s. They were, somewhat sadly, faster and easier to work with than the locals. And they made us our 2 missing blocks for only $30 each and in only a few weeks. Here are front and side shots of our savaged old trim and the new reproductions.
I’m pretty pleased. The bottom portions are not as long as the originals, and I’m a little concerned about that. But we sent drawings of the original dimensions, and I didn’t double-check them, so there could be many reasons why the repros are not completely exact. And frankly, evolution is a respectable part of old-house renovation. If these end up looking appropriate in their new home, then everything is good even if they are not perfect to millimeters.
As I inch toward finishing the front-door surround, new opportunities arise for tricking out the area. I’m talking doorbells. Later there’ll be the matter of the downstairs chime box. But for now I drool over accoutrements that are older than the house, so innapropriate, but damn:
I think I’m going to end up with at least one button (house demands two!) that has a directive like “push” or a label saying “visitors” because as seen in my upstairs bathroom, I have a bit an affinity for labeling. I hope all this helps me out later in life when my lead-dust-addled brain finds me staring at something wondering what I’m supposed to do with it.
As summer sinks below the horizon and the cold times begin their sneaky but inescapable creep, I’ve really got to figure out what to do about the front door surround. Figuring out how to replace the missing door itself is simply too much, so I’m putting that off for some distant future. But I’ve been moving ever so slowly through trying to restore what the front door region once looked like. This is what’s been facing the street for many years now:
Obviously, that’s a replacement door, and the right side is a cover-up.
Looking at the inside, I had a naive hope that the cover-up hid a narrow door that could be opened sometimes and latched other times. Though really, that’s not what the inside suggests. I guess I hoped that middle piece of wood was added later. But the alligatoring of the shellac is consistent with the rest of the wood trim.
When we started removing the aluminum cover-up outside, here’s what we found, which indicates it was not two doors but a door and a stationary light—and also something chopped off above:
After removing all the aluminum, we have this:
So some detail was chopped off at the top and the bottom of the wood divider.
Having worked on an old house with old paint and old problems for 8 years now, I understand the urge to cover it up and have everything seem nice. But why oh why couldn’t they have simply covered up? Wasn’t it more difficult to chop off than to cover up? I mean, was it ornate and huge in profile? I really doubt it, considering the rest of the house. Now I need to figure out what’s appropriate for the area and determine how I can add it. Any ideas? I need to dig through my 1910 Sears catalog.
So I’ve stripped off all the old paint and found oak underneath:
It took a few weeks to strip all the paint. It was kind of easy because the bottom coat seems to have been shellac. But also kind of hard because the finish was very weathered and had been painted over with brown paint and several coats of other colors, some of them very resistant to removal. Now I am working on how to showcase and preserve the oak for Chicago weather.
And I still have to pry off all the old caulk. But wow it’s going to look so much better when I’m done—in 7 years or so …
We’re all adults here, so I’m not going to sugarcoat this: I despise our front door.
I must respect it for it’s solidity, its locking ability and, uh, that’s all the enthusiasm I can muster. Its color combo is my most-hated of hues (a duo that appears throughout the house): brown and yellow. It—and that siding off to the side—are clearly just plugs jammed in to fill the space; the space that used to be occupied by double doors*, as seen in these photos from 1978 that the previous owner sent me a couple years after I bought the house. I’m happy to see them because they confirm what I deeply suspected. But they break my heart because the doors got tossed.
*Note from 2008: After starting work in this area, it became clear that only the left side was a door. It appears that the right side was a fixed light that mimicked the door.
And yes, these views are from two years after our country’s Bicentennial, when there seemed to be a national mandate regarding red, white and blue. Those are the same railings we just removed in the almost-done-at-least-for-this-year porch project.
But while the front doors are gone, the side porch door escaped their fate. And now it shows us what’s missing out front.
I need to do some work on this old survivor to touch up the shellac and stabilize the wood that’s warped and delaminated a little because there used to be a leak from the side porch roof before we moved in. Anyone have any tips?
