New Wallpaper!

We're on a roll. No sooner had we finished the upstairs baseboards and trim (June) and the door hardware (August), than we got started on wallpapering the hallway.

This is just a short hallway that connects all the upstairs rooms: three bedrooms, one bathroom, and the stairs down to the 2nd floor. It has a skylight in the ceiling, courtesy of some previous owners, and it has a reclaimed stickwork piece set into the wall, courtesy of Yours Truly, circa 2015.

We'd done some minor renovation to this hallway a few years ago, and painted it a neutral peach color. (It had been dark green.) That was fine, but it was kind of a placeholder. We'd always intended to paper it later on, and so, here we are.

Kathy picked out a nice wallpaper pattern that didn't clash with the existing (and very old) wallpaper in the rest of the house. We're not removing any of the old wallpaper (much as we might like to), so any new patterns have to coexist with it. Best of all, the new wallpaper was pre-pasted, so it'll be easy to hang!

You would think. We dunked the first piece in the water trough just like they tell you and... nothing. It's just wet paper. What the...?

Turns out, it wasn't pre-pasted wallpaper after all. It just said so on the label. We tried another piece from a different roll, thinking maybe it was just a manufacturing error. No joy.

March down to the wallpaper store (conveniently located just a few blocks away) to say, politely, wassup? They were very nice and gave us all the free wallpaper paste we needed to finish the job. Back home to try again.

Pasting wallpaper is messy work, but we managed to finish the job in one day. It's a small hallway, but every single piece had to be measured, cut, and trimmed to fit around some obstacle or other. A doorway here, a sloped ceiling there. And none of the walls are perfectly straight or smooth, of course. But between us I think we did a pretty good job.

More Brass Work

Before we finished the door hardware upstairs we put the finishing touches on some of the decorative brass pieces. Here are a couple of escutcheons* that go behind the doorknobs. They don't match, but plenty of stuff in this house doesn't.

We also cleaned up the crystal, porcelain, and brass doorknobs (at least one set of each). They were all paint-splattered like everything else, but they cleaned up easily enough. It was also a good opportunity to replace some of the fiddly little screws holding everything together.

*There's a word you don't get to use often! 

Mortise & Tension

The door hardware upstairs comes in two styles: old and older. The merely old ones are called mortise locks because they're mortised into the door, meaning you cut a hollow pocket into the wood to accept the hardware. Then the entire lock mechanism slips into the pocket, completely contained inside the door. Hardly anybody does mortise locks anymore, and I can see why.

The really old locks, however, sit on the outside of the door. They're called rim locks and they're also square boxes like the mortise locks, but they don't go inside; they get screwed to the outside. Internally, both mechanism work the same. They even look pretty similar sitting on the workbench. The major giveaway is the decorative brass end plate on the mortise locks.

The mortised locks have smooth sides designed to fit snugly inside the door pocket, but with a pretty decorative end plate that you can see when it's installed. These were all coated with several decades' worth of paint, but once they're cleaned up they look pretty nice.

Some of the end plates are definitely prettier than others. You can also see the deadbolt that sticks out just below the angled spring latch. We don't have keys for these anymore, but they can't be all that hard to find. I've taken the mechanisms apart, and they're not complicated locks. I suspect one basic key would work on all of them. (For you locksmithing nerds, it's a lever lock, not a warded lock.) It relies mostly on gravity to make it work. Don't install it upside-down or you'll lock yourself in!

Our rim locks mount to the outside of the door. They're more utilitarian and less decorative. They have a thumb latch at the top that locks the mechanism and prevents the doorknob from turning. It's not as secure as the deadbolt, but these are just interior doors anyway. I don't think anyone's going to break into (or out of) the bathroom.

On the other hand, because these locks are mounted to the exterior of the door and not hidden inside, the manufacturer dressed them up a little bit. Here's a closeup of the one in my room. You can see it says, "PAT'D JULY 21 1865 B.L.W."

Presumably BLW is the manufacturer. And just because it was patented in 1865 -- Civil War era -- doesn't mean it was made in that year, but it's clearly very old. Probably original to the house, which was built in 1893. We've got three like this upstairs, plus two of the mortise locks.

Jasco & Brasso

My next two kids are going to be named Jasco and Brasso. Jasco because he (she?) is great at cleaning up old paint, and Brasso for the nice polish afterwards. Those two have been my constant companions for the past few days. I feel like we're related.

Kathy and I finally got around to cleaning up and reinstalling the door latches upstairs. Just in time, too, because the summer weather has been nice and with the windows open the doors have a tendency to slam shut. Or slam open. With no latches to hold them in place, we're reduced to using makeshift doorstops to keep everything from swinging in the breeze. And when a door does slam shut, you have to poke a little finger into one of the exposed holes and try to coax it open again. Not terribly convenient.

All the door hardware was coated in layer after layer of paint. And under that, rust. So it all went out into the garage for a thorough field strip, clean, and reassembly. I thought a simple wipe-down with paint thinner might do the job, but of course that doesn't work. It took several applications of Jasco, along with vigorous application of a stiff wire brush, to get all the paint off.

Surprise! Some of the mechanism inside is brass. It was so dirty I couldn't tell. Most of these door locks are made from iron (not steel), but with brass for the moving parts. I cleaned them inside and out and applied some white grease, and now they work much batter. They even look nice and shiny inside, although nobody will ever know.