2005-01-11: Adventures in Lock Replacement

So, that evening I left work a little early, and called up Nicole to have her come hang out at the house while I remove the doorknob and lock from the front door, take it to Home Depot for identification, and replace it. I'm fully aware that there are standards in doorknobs, and that one size is supposed to fit all. However, I'm also used to dealing with this trailer, and the parts used in it are anything but normal for a house. So, I took the doorknob. When I walked into Home Depot, I promptly found the identical twin to the doorknob I was replacing. It was selling for a whole $5, and was meant to keep prying children out of closets. In retrospect, I'm quite glad that it rusted out and that I'm not trusting my security to a glorified closet door.

I replaced it with a $30 Schlage residential lock with a lifetime warranty, which the Home Depot dude assured me would be rust proof. Of course, once I got it home, it commenced raining heavily. Compounding that, I decided to test and see if the new door bolt would close properly, before I attached the knob. With the other door knob, I could open the bolt with a screwdriver if I tugged in the direction away from the door frame. Apparently Schlage finds as much of a security concern with that as I do, because it wouldn't budge when I used the screwdriver, thus locking myself out in the rain without any means to open the front door. This was another reason to be glad I'd called Nicole over, as she went and unbolted the side door. This is also a reason to look at putting a security door on the other side of the house, with a lock which can be opened from the outside.

At any rate, after tromping my soaked self through the house, I inserted the doorknob, turned it, and opened up the door. I then resumed crouching in the rain, installing the new door knob. A few minutes later, I was able to finish screwing the knob into place from the inside, and the new lock was well situated. I did have to leave off the front door's strike plate in order to get the door to close. Brian says he'll dremel out the mounting cavity a bit so that I can actually install the strike plate later on. It's kind of important, considering that if you zoom in on the image, you can see that the previous strike plate had broken off and the aluminum door frame had sustained some pretty serious damage from the previous lock's bolt. Apparently, rust had started quite some time back, and had been affecting the rigidity of the bolt. I'd had to bend the door frame back in shape with pliers.

Of course, now that it's installed, I think it looks quite nice.

However, the new Schlage lock closes very gently - even without the strike plate installed. The only thing which concerns me right now about the lack of a strike plate, is how fragile the aluminum is and the fact that it'd give way if someone were to pull on the door really well. This may be why the park pays for security folks, and why I have security arrangements of my own, but frankly I'd rather the door stop them and not require the use of either deterrent.