Remember when Sophie broke the door {hilarious video footage here}?! I had convinced myself that it was like six months ago, but when I scrolled through Instagram looking for the picture, it turns out it was in November. LAST November. We had been living with a square of cardboard on our front door for thirteen months. When we declared 2014 the year of lazy, we really got after it.
In case you haven’t been to my house before, the stairs to our porch are on the side and there is a tall rock wall along the front of our porch. Nobody can see the door from the drive or the street and we almost always use the back door to come and go. Add a dark shade to the window and it was pretty easy to forget that we were missing a pane of glass.
There is a part of me that dreaded replacing the door, despite the broken glass and doggie claw marks. We assume this is the original door from 1923, but at the very least it is old and has vintage hardware. The knob on the outside is purple glass and the only way to lock it is with a slide bolt. Way to be safe, right?!
We had been debating what kind of door to replace it with, when Josh got a wild hair a few weekends ago. He declared he was tired of being lazy and we were replacing the door before the holidays. Wait, what? Lucky for us {extremely lucky given nothing is consistent in an almost-hundred year old home}, all of the interior and exterior doors appear to be the same size in our home. We had a door between our kitchen and living areas which doesn’t get much use and we decided to re-purpose it as our front door. I was kind of over having a glass door anyway, so Josh got to work. In no time at all, we had an operating door, but we still needed new hardware and some weather stripping, thanks to a gap at the top of the frame.
Fast forward to this week when we made three trips to Lowe’s within a 24 hour time period and spent almost $300 on supplies. Our quick, free fix was turning south quick. On Sunday afternoon, we pulled off all of the exterior trim {breaking the doorbell in the process} and replaced it with new wood that left no gaps.
Amid my favorite Christmas decorations to date and a whole lot of sawdust, we watched NFL football, ate Zaxby’s for dinner and had an epic Taylor Swift dance party in our Christmas pajamas. Fortunately, our daddy has mad dance skills and knows all the words to Blank Space. What started out as a new door and a fresh coat of paint turned into a major project that didn’t end until almost midnight.
We installed our very first deadbolt and can lock our house from the outside for the first time in ten years. I can’t believe how embarrassed I am to type that sentence?! After the kids were in bed, we ran an air compressor and a vacuum cleaner right outside their bedroom door and they never made a peep. We might be lazy, but we raised some crazy good sleepers.
This sweet girl just laid in her chair watching us for hours and didn’t even seem to mind the mess we made all over and around her.
So despite the fact that I promised a rare weekend post full of Christmas decor, you’ll have to settle for a random Thursday post of construction dust and evergreen instead. I really do love how my tree and garlands turned out, but it’s hard to see them around the piles of tools on the coffee table. In my defense, I did actually take some pictures over the weekend, but there was so much chaos in front of and behind every single thing I photographed, that it seemed a waste of energy to share them. I’m calling for a redo. AFTER we get that front door painted peacock blue.
