If you needed yet another reason to go for the beautiful softness of patinated brass in your door furniture, here it is! We’ve already looked at how brass is naturally bactericidal, without having any resins, coatings or anything else applied to it. And we also know (from the foot pull post!) exactly how icky door knobs that aren’t in your own home can be.

Well, courtesy of an American news service, we are reminded that if somebody with the flu covers up a cough or sneeze with their hand, exactly like they are supposed to for good hygiene (when there aren’t any tissues handy), but then needs to open a door immediately afterwards, that door knob becomes a little flu heaven. Flu germs are one of those that can survive for a time at room temperature, and if they have little droplets of liquid (mmmm!) to live in, then you basically need to wait until other people have wiped the door knob clean with their clean hands to not have microscopic flu monsters running around on your skin.

While brass door knobs help with this issue, we are still working on converting the world! In the meantime, medical staff advise the same thing that work safety posters all over the world do – unless you have just washed your hands, you should consider them dirty. This means that if you clean your hands before you eat and even before you touch your face, you should be fairly safe from infecting yourself with the flu. Then if you clean your hands after coughing or sneezing (better yet, sneeze into a tissue and then clean them), and also after going to the bathroom, and eating, you can also protect other people from getting the flu … a flu which, if you pass it on, may eventually come back to haunt you!

Photo credits: Do the Sleeve Sneeze by djcmackay

Christmas is all about family togetherness … and your kids are likely the ones that are constantly asking for more time with you. Over Christmas you get to indulge them – they won’t know what hit them! They may even be so surprised they faint … and you can lie down on the floor next to them and have a little nap :-)

Here’s a lovely activity you can do together in the lead up to Christmas – if you follow the Roman Catholic traditions, around the same time you are decorating your tree. These door knob notes are super easy and suitable for kids of all ages – although younger ones might need a bit of help handling the scissors to cut them out.

They print out one per standard size sheet of paper – but you may like to glue them to construction cardboard, or even cardboard recycled from a cereal box or something similar, to help with durability and looks! It may even be handy to glue an ‘Enter’ and a ‘Do Not Enter’ door knob note on some card, back to back, to leave on your bathroom door for when you have all of your friends and family around.

One small side note – get out your peeping glasses and check the little addendums down the bottom of each knob note before you print them out (it is all too easy to decide which one to use just on the basis of it being your favourite animal). All of them have a copyright warning down the bottom, but some have little notes above that which make them only suitable for some rooms of the house. For instance, your relatives might look at you a little askew if you put the ‘Do Not Enter … Good Child Sleeping’ sign on the reverse of the ‘Enter’ sign on your bathroom door! Or even the ‘Ssh … I’m Sleeping’ one for your bathroom (even though it may be true). The ‘Keep out – Top Secret Mission in Progress’ knob note might be more truthful and effective ;-)

Well, the world sure is a disgusting, disgusting place! You may have received the email that has been going around for a while detailing how many litres of other people anal gases you inhale in a day … how many litres of urine you ingest in an hour of swimming in a public pool … what percentage of doorknobs have traces of semen on them … and how many bugs you are likely to swallow in a year, while you are asleep. If you were as horrified as we were upon reading all of this, you may be glad to know that in a small way, you can fight the power of germs, by choosing brass door knobs!

Apparently it is quite a common teaching exercise for people in the medical profession to go around taking samples from various surfaces that we might commonly encounter and analyzing the germs that can be found on them. It makes sense – it would definitely drive home, in an absolutely unarguable way, why they must wash their hands and wear gloves after every time they touch medical waste, or in between patients, or before they go fiddling around with your precious, hygienic innards! (more…)

Well, we have said it before, that you only know that something has real value when somebody else in the world thinks it is worth stealing! It has been reported that gangs across Britain have been stealing brass and other items – tens of millions of pounds worth – in order to feed a growing demand for metals in India and China, as their construction industries boom.

We are not talking about a few isolated incidents here, of things that are unusual to steal, but not inconceivable (like, for instance, a traditional and well-made door knob!). Apparently these thefts are on an absolutely huge scale – there have been so many people missing door knobs, door knockers, letter plates, and other items from the fronts of heir houses, that police now have a special task force to deal with it and all officers have been alerted to the problem.

Thieves have also been stealing much more exotic things in their thirst for metals … lead is in huge demand, and in Britain where olden-style lead rooves are fairly common, over one summer 19 schools in the Midlands had their rooves stolen!. A formerly happy bus shelter, which used to provide protection from the rain for hundreds of kids and grown ups, was also brutally stolen, burnt alive and sadistically reformed into building materials!

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Door handles are one of those things that have not changed very much in hundreds of years … our genuine antiques still look, and more importantly still function pretty much like door handles that are made today. This also makes it possible to easily and fairly economically create reproductions of antique door knobs also. They are not like the antique iron (which was, at a time, little more than a piece of shaped metal, heated, with a wooden handle so that you could hold it without burning yourself. They are also, at this stage (!) not like the antique clothes dryer – which had no electrical wiring, used no heat, and definitely didn’t shrink your clothes … it was better known as a mangle!

However, it seems like door knobs have finally made a great evolutionary leap. The Baser door handle was, like all inventions, born out of one person’s necessity, which was happily coupled with a bit of technical know-how. This particular door handle is a push-pull design – you need less than a pound of force (not very much!) to push it to allow the door to open, and even on the pull side there is no grabbing or twisting required. This has meant it has been approved and accredited by the American Disabled Association (ADA), and is great for people with arthritis … or even a lazy streak who’d prefer not to expend any more effort than necessary in doing something as boring as opening a door!

As an added bonus, it can easily be opened by dogs! While that may sound trite to begin with, actually it is extremely handy for disabled people who have assistance dogs – for blind people, and for people in wheelchairs or who for some other reason find it difficult to reach door handles the dog can open the door for them. Even from the pull side, all that is needed is a simple tug attachment in order to enable the dog to open the door from this side too. Wonderful!
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