The House With No Doorknobs

We're very open here. In the sense that all of our upstairs doors are standing open because they don't have any hardware on them right now.

Part of fixing and installing all of the upstairs trim naturally involves lots of sanding and painting. (We've got the mess to prove it.) And that means removing all the door hardware so that we can sand and/or paint the doors. We removed all the doors from their hinges and then stripped all the old layers of paint off of the hardware before re-hanging the doors.

That only took a few days, but we never quite got around to re-installing all of the latch mechanisms. So our doors have been swinging open for the past few weeks.

I've heard that doorknobs are a uniquely American thing. Other countries use levers, not knobs. That was certainly the case when we lived in Europe in the 1990s. We never saw a doorknob the whole time. They really do seem to be an American invention.

We've gone that one better. We have no hardware at all.