It took me a while to realize how much I didn’t like our interior doors. Once we moved in, I was just happy to have three bedrooms and three bathrooms and I wasn’t really thinking about the overall aesthetic of the interior finishes beyond paint. Fast forward five years and now every time I look at our 1980s style doors, I shake my head.
Here’s the thing, with LB in the mix now, our weekend DIY time is obviously short and few and far between – just like many of you, I’m sure! Gone are the days of getting up at 8am, putting on a pot of coffee and working all day on a giant project until it’s finished. It just isn’t realistic for us anymore. So this year, we are going to be ‘weekend warriors’ and tackle the simple updates and improvements that can be done in a couple of hours and that make a big difference. This weekend, on a Saturday morning, we finally tackled those doors. We’ve partnered with Schlage Canada to review their interior door knobs and to show how swapping out dated knobs for modern ones can be an almost instant improvement!
Here are the before shots of our upstairs door knobs. Do you guys know that we have lived in this house for almost five years and until this week, I didn’t even NOTICE that all the upstairs knobs were different?! LOL As soon as I realized that, boy was I glad to have new knobs. This is the Master Bedroom door. I picked out the Plymouth Knob in Aged Bronze to replace them. SO MUCH PRETTIER. 
This is the door to the nursery… and then below that is the door to the guest room with the unmade bed and the two lounging cats. 😛
When you think about it, door hardware is in every room in the house, so it is a quick, easy and affordable way to tie your look together seamlessly in just a couple of hours. We quickly realized swapping the door knobs couldn’t be a ‘nap time’ project because it required LB’s door to be open! So we tackled her door first and tag teamed it like a super DIY parenting duo. It definitely took us longer to do with LB crawling around and making a mess and wanting to touch everything.
We started, obviously, by removing the old door knob and the wall plate. Replacing door knobs is quite simple and all you really need is a basic multi-bit screwdriver and then maybe a small hand chisel. I’ll explain that in a second. 
Essentially, you just need to make sure that you’re installing the pieces in the right order. Being me, I read the instructions 12 times before doing the first knob. All in all, it is quite straightforward.
You put the long piece into the door first and then just screw it into place. The majority of interior doors are standard measurements, so any knobs you replace should just fit right into the existing door hole. Now here’s where you might need that chisel. When you install the plate on the other side of the door, you need to make sure it sits flush and allows the knob to latch securely. We had to chisel out a tiny bit of the door jamb in the nursery to make it a snug fit. The other two doors didn’t require any chiselling at all. 
And as you can see in the background, replacing the door knobs may also require having yogurt snacks at the ready LOL!! I love the way these Aged Bronze knobs compliment the other metals we have in the house and really modernize our 1980s style hallway. Schlage offers a variety of styles that suit any space.
Each knob has a lock on the inside and I was a bit worried about having a lock on LB’s door. BUT each set also comes with an unlocking pin that we have put in a safe place in case LB decides to throw a fit and lock herself in her room at some point. I seriously try not to think about the temper tantrums that are likely on the horizon for us. 
Like really! These knobs look like they belonged here all along. Good bye nasty, jiggly, loud, mismatched brassy knobs! Hello, smooth, tight, bronze-y goodness 🙂 It always amazes me what can be accomplished visually when you switch one small thing. I’m so glad we did this project! I will be snapping some more updated shots of the entire hallway soon. I’m working on some ideas for a new mirror and art work. These door knobs have inspired me to keep going with the small changes that have big impact 🙂 
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