5-Panel Doors & Other Interior Excitement

Antique raised 5-panel doors: Installed! Master bed, study closet, bathroom

And Matt said he thought we weren't doing enough on the inside of the house...

Three Doors Hung
Javier the Carpenter installed three of our antique doors today for us: Dottie, Greg, and Ezekial, which are the three raised five-panel doors. Now that they've been trimmed and the hardware applied, we need to stain and varnish them. On the whole, it seemed to go smoothly, but as is always the case with our house, Javier was challenged by its lack of perpendicularity. He hung the doors level, but the frames into which he had to fit them are sort of trapezoidal, which is interesting. This is particularly noticeable in the master bedroom, so he's going to bring a wedge-shaped piece of trim to offset the gap at the top right.

Rimlock Reassembled

The mechanism of the reassembled rimlock. Click for bigness.

Inspired by the general door-related hustle and bustle, Matt finally got the old rimlock that came with the house to work. This took so long (we both worked on it most of the morning), and there is so little guidance on the internet about how to reassemble a rimlock with all its pesky springs that we decided to make a video for the benefit of other DIYers. Matt was the talent. I directed. If Blogger ever succeeds in uploading the darn thing, I'll post it below.

How to Reassemble a Rimlock: The Movie

A side note about the rimlock. There is no company name on this one, but there are numbers. Several of the components are stamped "1085" (or "1035"--hard to tell which), and the back plate is also stamped with an "8." The front plate bears a number "2", and both front and back have these odd braille-y looking marks: eight dots on the back; six dots on the front. Not sure what it means, but is interesting.

Interesting markings on the rimlock

You Have Been Diverted...
In other news, our washer motor went out a week or so ago. We figured we have 3 options: (1) repair it, which Matt thinks would be a waste of money, (2) replace it with a cheapo stop-gap piece o' crap, which seems to me wasteful and galling, or (3) bite the bullet and get one of those fancy-dan front loaders I've been yearning after for ages. Guess which one we (I) chose. (It's good for the environment! Reduces your utility bills! Looks super-sexy!)

There is, however, a wrinkle. The mudroom has always been this weird hybrid. It had a door to the outside, a washer and dryer, a shower, a toilet, a sink, and the water heater. I think it may have been the house's original front entry, which explains why it also has the fancy portico and a sidewalk that dead-ends in the middle of the east yard.

Somewhere along the way, it was demoted from front door to side door, and it was a steady downhill slide from there. The reason for the laundry appliances is clear enough, but I have no idea why an extra bathroom--in the laundry room-slash-mudroom--was necessary. We long ago yanked the toilet and sink in the interest of simply being able to navigate the room, but the shower is still there in a partially assembled state. The old washer is currently sitting in it.

This looks not entirely genteel (by which I mean "is gross" and also "looks icky"), the new washer will need more space, and the shower surround cuts into the room in an utterly gratuitous manner. So now seems like an opportune moment to rip out the shower, clean the scuzz off the walls (it's the one room in our house that has never felt the tender caress of my latex-laden brush), paint, and generally try to make the place look less likely to incubate the latest variant of swine flu or SARS or bird flu or whatever the CDC's flavor of the month happens to be. Because right now, there's a deeply ground-in, decades-old grodiness that no mere mop or broom can vanquish.

We were going to try to hit a daylily open house tomorrow, but I think we'd better spend that time on the laundry room instead. The laundry project also pre-empts any staining, gutter-hanging, bermudagrass-fighting plans we had. Resources hastily re-allocated. Attention re-focused. Vision re-imagineered. We used laundromats for years. No way they genie's going back in that grimy, over-priced, time-sucking bottle with uncomfortable plastic chairs.

Of Rimlocks and Trees

I can't decide whether or not I mean that title to be a reference to Lewis Carroll. If so, it's pretty weak. But it's the best I can do at the moment, so let's go with it.

More horticultural news: my lovely cybister amaryllis, 'Meringue,' is in bloom. Cybisters are a (relatively) new group of amaryllis, so called because they arose from a cross between the traditional Dutch Amaryllis and Hippeastrum cybister, a South American species that is pretty darn breathtaking in its wild form (the Internation Bulb Society hosts a good picture of H. cybister). Love, love, LOVE these hybrids, which are still a bit rare. When my mad obsession with home restoration has run its course, I'm going to expand my collection--they are just spectacular.

Cybister amaryllis 'Meringue'

Also in very exciting plant news, we finally bought that 'Little Gem' magnolia I've been wanting since what seems like the Dawn of Time (but obviously can't really be much than 1 year ago, when we first saw the house and contemplated buying it). Long ago, there was a very silly oleander planted smack in front of the living room window. Instead of accenting the house, it obscured it, as you can see in this old picture that used to be part of our banner. It reminds my of one of Cinderella's step-sisters, attempting to be coy by ostentatiously hiding her face behind her fan.

House with silly oleander hiding its face--Mar. 2007

The day we bought the house (or possibly the day after that), the thing committed seppuku by falling flat on the ground and yanking its roots half out. Which was pretty much good riddance as far as we were concerned, but it left the house with a distressing nakedness--a weird lack of boundaries or connection with the earth. It needed a punctuation mark. Voilà the 'Little Gem'! A graceful exclamation point that changes our front from "House" to "House!" See how much better that is?

House. Now with 'Little Gem' exclamation point!

More is needed, of course. There is the temptation of azaleas, which you can actually apparently grow here. And as our house faces north, the front almost never gets direct sun, to the intense exasperation of the roses ('Red Cascade,' 'Mrs. RM Finch,' and long-time favorite 'Cramoisi Superiuer') that I insisted on planting there. But perfect for a beautiful bank of azaleas!

We also planted a 'Tuscarora' red crape myrtle to the left (see the profile at Dave's Garden). It's smaller and less forceful than the magnolia (at the moment anyway). Sort of the ¡ ("signo de admiración invertido"--did you know that was its name? Me neither) to the magnolia's !. Now the front says "¡House!" and how stimulating is that?

I also wanted to throw in (another) blurry picture of the mechanism of our RL. Co. rimlock (my camera apparently considers the rimlock an object unworthy of its consideration--I took about 8 pix--none of them were crisp). Matt got it functioning by moving a flat piece of metal that allows the key bolt to function and inserting it in the doorknob/tongue section of the mechanism instead (see arrow below). So now the key bolt doesn't work, but as we haven't got the key, that's not a big deal.

You can see that RL. Co. was serious about security--it's made with two bolts, in addition to the tongue--one was a deadbolt and the other was operated by a key.

I love the fact that there is a groove worn around the keyhole--you can see that people were actually using this as a lock. A giant "duh" to that, I guess, but I find it oddly endearing.

Anyway, when Matt was working on this, we both did a lot of poking around on the internet for information about how to make the mechanism work, and we just didn't find much. So for all you amateur rimlock restorers out there, here. Have a picture.

The inner workings of our RL. Co. lock. The red arrow points to a long strip of metal that pushes the lever to the right when the door knob is at its default position, in turn pushing the lever for the tongue out.

Rimlock

I wanted to do a slightly better job of documenting our rimlocks. We've got 2: 1 came with the house, and the other we just bought.

A rimlock (or rim lock) is a lock whose mechanism is attached to the exterior of the door. I don't know anything about the history of the rimlock--they are unknown to wikipedia, and the few mentions on the internet were sketchy and brief.

Here's our original:

Original antique rimlock

You can see that ours is missing the piece that rimlock latches into (the "catch plate"). There was obviously a place for it on the door, but the piece itself is gone. Not sure how difficult it will be to replace it.

And here's the one we recently bought:

Our RL. Co. rimlock

I don't feel entirely confident that the catch plate and lock are a match set--they're different sizes, and the ornamentation on the two parts doesn't match. Still, it's functional.

Well, sort of. Neither of our rimlocks are in working order at the moment. The house original is currently broken down into its constituent parts, and Matt isn't sure how to reassemble it. Apparently, he unscrewed what my Dad refers to as "the Jesus screw." Dad had warned me about that screw, but apparently Matt wasn't around at that moment, because when he took down the lock to clean it, he went right for that screw and the whole thing sprang apart.

The new rimlock is by the company RL. Co. (do you suppose "RL." stands for "rimlock"?--I think it's very weird that there's a period after the L, but not after the R--as thought it were an abbreviation, not an acronym.) I haven't been able to find out anything about them, though I did find our exact same model for sale on the internet at Scherer's Architectural Antiques for $90. Here's how it looks when it's all prettied up:

The same model as our RL. Co. rimlock

Here's a similar model for sale (for $175! That $22 price is looking pretty good) at Mowery Antiques:

Another RL. Co. rimlock--a slightly different model

Check out all the nifty matching doo-dads. I especially like the little keyhole frame for the reverse side of the door.

And another example, from e-bay

Another slightly different model

Ours is missing a spring to make the tongue stick out. We're hoping the locksmiths at Cothron's locks in Austin will be able to help us out. Matt tried jimmying with a spring, but he couldn't get it to work.

The un-springy innards of our RL. C0. rimlock. Needs a good polishing, too

And on a completely different note, here's Po. (It's late, and I'm tired. I can't come up with a plausible segue. We have some pictures of Po and I'm putting them online. Period.) We've been training him--he now sort-of responds to "come" and "sit." Isn't he sitting beautifully?

Po, looking demure. Check out his big galumphing thumb.

However, Po doesn't much care for flash photography.

Po, looking extremely irritated