Ain't No Sunshine

Kentucky lately has had a little bit of rain. By "a little", I mean a lot. By "a lot", I mean every day we are getting a thunderstorm that lasts at least an hour and has taken out power in parts of the city every single time. Most of the time, the power goes out at Beth and David's house. Almost like clockwork (Fayette County, you should probably fix that), but we had managed to avoid it thus far.

Until the other day.

Three of the main roads surrounding us, UK campus, and most of downtown were out of power at 5 in the afternoon. No stop lights worked, there was a lot of confusion as to whether to stay in our hot muggy homes or go out somewhere that might have air conditioning, during rush hour, and the 3G was so jammed up that getting updates on when the power might return was almost impossible. (On the up side, this was the only day so far that Beth and David DID have power. Figures.)

I was out of the house when the power went out, so I returned to a dark home. I tried my garage door opener the allotted 'duh' amount of times before realizing that I wasn't going to be able to get into the house.

See, when we purchased our house, we weren't given a key to the front door. The only keys we were given were to a dead bolt, the garage-to-laundry door, and another random key that we still aren't sure of. This meant that we weren't getting inside till the power was back on. This also meant that we had to stare at this face through the window till we found a way in.

We had put off replacing our front door lock due to a false sense of security. Suddenly that security was gone and the four legged guilt trips stuck in our air conditioned home were sadly reminding us of our puppy-parent failure.

Once Scott got home, we grabbed some dinner (thankfully Bourbon and Toulouse was open, had power, and wasn't busy), then ran over to Home Depot. The nice thing about home improvement stores during power outages is that they can still run on generators, which is exactly what Home Depot was doing.

We chose our new front door lock. It is a little fancy because if we were going to spend the money, we wanted it done right the first time. We also liked the fact that it had a bit of a skirting around the dead bolt to cover an issue we had with our previous dead bolt.

Sorry about the picture quality. I ended up using my phone for this post. You'll get the idea, though.

We had a gap. We have no idea why we had a gap. We are figuring that whoever drilled the hole didn't drill it correctly, so it was more of an oval than a circle. I really didn't care how it got there, just that we would be able to cover it up.

Through some blog magic, I will tell you that we managed to get into the house. We are lucky enough that we taught the girls to open doors. That might not sound true, but that's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Scott started assembling the new door fixture right away. He quickly took off the old door knob and dead bolt. He then attached the new deadbolt. That part was easy.

Since we bought a fancy handle that needed to be attached at the bottom and the top, we had to drill a new hole. Scott made a template to lined it up. This showed him where to drill so that both sides of the door would fit together.

We were then able to mount the bottom of the handle.

For reference, here is the front.

And here is the back. That dark washer with a gold screw head is the screw that holds the bottom of the handle in place. It has a cover that just pops on to help it blend with the rest of the assembly, but we just hadn't gotten to that yet.

Next, we had to make sure that it actually closed. We lined it up with the previously drilled holes in the door frame and they didn't line up. (Of course they didn't.)

Scott took a chisel and took out some of the material so that the latches would catch. This wasn't a very difficult part, but it made all the difference. Closing our door now is much easier than it was with the old locks.

Now our door is finished and we are so excited to be able to get into our house "just in case". I know a lot of you are probably thinking that we are crazy for not fixing this issue a year ago when we first moved in, but live and learn. We figured that if we couldn't get in, no one else would be able to, either! That theory worked up till now! Honestly, we didn't use our front door that much anyway, so on a regular basis, it was dead bolted about 90% of the time. Now we use it much more often.

The door looks really swank now, too. I love how the oil rubbed bronze matches my rabbit so well and really ties it all together. I just wish you could see it when our glass door is closed.

Oh well. It does add curb appeal (it's just to bad you can't see it from the curb).

Have you ever had any emergency DIY you HAD to accomplish? Let me know in the comments!