Porcelain door knobs come in so many beautiful and colorful varieties … they are the only door knob medium that you can actually paint on, and the ones that we do have need to be well preserved. Here’s a few tips on how to safely clean and maintain porcelain, and also mineral (clay) door knobs.

The first step is pretty predictable – soft cloth, soap and water. Nothing too fancy though! Dish detergent will do just fine. If it can be easily done, remove your knob from the door for a more thorough cleaning. This is applicable to brass and other metal knobs as well.

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Considering that you’re reading a blog on a classical hardware and lighting site, there will probably be many of you that have a home which is classical… or to put it more bluntly, old! And old houses have old doors. And you know what happens when things get old… they stop working properly, they can’t hear like they used to, they get a tiny bit cranky … oh right, we’re talking about doors!

Doors which don’t work properly can be both a pain in the backside, an embarrassment and a waste of money – doors are the number one form of controlling which parts of your house are heated or cooled. So if you’ve got a problem with a door—what’s your problem?!

It won’t open!

Aside from checking whether it is locked when it doesn’t open at all, if your door doesn’t open easily, there are a couple of solutions. You may have too many coats of paint on your door and frame, making both thicker than they were intended to be. Or, you may have doors made of wood which is susceptible to swelling with water, and if it has rained a bit recently, the humidity may be swelling both the door and the frame. On some doors, you may have a loose hinge which drops when the door opens, putting it out of alignment and making one corner or edge hit the frame.

If you have too many coats of paint on your door, you have a couple of options… which one you choose is actually a personality test, too! You can choose to go the slower more methodical way of using paint stripper and either a brush or a scraper to get the paint off. Or you can go the one hit, get right down to it method, which is to grab a sander (or in severe cases, a grinder), and manually remove all that paint. Which is actually quite satisfying! (more…)

Now, if you don’t like door knobs, you have no reason to be reading this blog … but perhaps you have just run out of inspiration for new knob themes in your house, or you now have an extra door, but can’t source a matching handle to go with your other antique ones. Well, this door handle might be a little big for us to ship – but it is definitely one of the more interesting ones we have seen around!

It is actually a book. A Sherlock Holmes book, in a piece of intentional serendipity – and it opens the door to this person’s hot water service closet! While we can’t imagine it replacing the old twist handle, or even the lever handle, and it is arguably more or less secure than a traditional key-lock, it is definitely more ingenious.

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Do you ever get confused when we talk about rim versus mortise locks? Are you just as likely to let the entire conversation slide over your head, and call a locksmith? Well, you don’t need to be familiar with drills or routers to install this door lock … nor do you have to worry about where your keys are before you duck down to the shop to buy some milk for breakfast. You do, however, need a little bit of electronics knowledge … probably a bit more than the blogger who wrote about this knock-operated door unlocker seems to assume the lay person has .

The apparently ‘decidedly low-tech unlock mechanism’, winding the rubber band around the lock handle might be a little hard to duplicate for those of us who enjoy the simpler times of the past … but are pretty cool nonetheless! Although, we agree whole heartedly with the comments of one of the blog’s readers, who says ‘Try and open that door when you’re drunk’!

You know, at Architectural Classics we all love old things – but we aren’t biased! There are plenty of new things we love too, and some of those are the advances in science and technology that mean we can do things faster and more efficiently. Efficiency is so important when it comes to your energy use – fossil fuels are limited, and we don’t feel very enthused about selling lumps of coal as antique oddities in years to come!

The doors that you put all your gorgeous door knockers, handles, locks and plates onto can make quite a difference to how energy efficient your home is. This is one case when older is not necessarily better … modern doors are generally made out of better quality wood than older ones, and tradespeople now have better tools with which to hang the door. So, to improve your energy efficiency with a minimum of disruption to the style of your house, one option is just to replace all of the old doors that you have with the most similar looking new one you can find, and then have them professionally installed.

The best, cheapest, quickest and least disruptive way to increase your energy efficiency though, is to buy weatherstripping for your doors. This is especially valuable if you live in an old house, as well as loving having old things in your house! As older doors are generally leakier and draughtier than newer ones, this is a cheap quick, and pretty necessary step to take in improving your energy efficiency! Incidentally.

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