Swapping Out a Doorknob

All of the doors on the second floor of our castle have the cool old brass doorknobs with tons of character. I love the patina that they have developed from decades of use, and the little bit of shimmer that they lend to the hallway.

However, the mechanism for the brass doorknob on the bathroom door was broken, and the doorknob would routinely fall off and crash to the floor. This usually happened when we had guests over and they went to use the restroom for the first time. ;-) Not exactly the kind of first impression we were going for, you know?

We tried to fix it multiple times, but there were a few parts missing that made it only a temporary fix each time. Not long after our latest fix-it session, the knob would once again crash to the floor.

We have a ReStore near our house, so we swung by one day to see if they had any old brass doorknobs that matched the style of our house for a reasonable price. Alas, they neither had matching knobs, nor were they reasonable! :-)

Then one day I remembered that there were some random house parts sitting up in the attic from before we moved in. I went up and rooted around in the dusty eaves, and found the two ends of a glass doorknob hidden among the cobwebs. After a couple of alterations, and harvesting two screws from the old doorknob mechanism, we now have a working, non-crashing doorknob on the bathroom door. And, the cut glass is just gorgeous! I love how it looks against the dark wood of the door, and the bit more sparkle that it brings to that dark corner full o' doors.

So for zero dollars and cents, and just a bit of ingenuity, we fixed a problem and added some glam on top of that! Gotta love projects that are easy on the eyes as well as the wallet!


Linked to Metamorphosis Monday, DIY Parade, Making Monday Marvelous,, Making the World Cuter Monday

Keeping the Sinks Clean

After nearly four years of being responsible for my own house, I've learned a few things about keeping a clean home. Actually, I've learned a lot. :-) But today, I'm going to talk about clean sinks. I've discovered that if two main areas of my home are clean, then I feel like I have a good handle on the house's cleanliness. Those areas are the kitchen sink and the bathroom sink. If the kitchen sink is free of dishes, and the bathroom sink is free of hair and toothpaste, then I feel like I am doing a good job maintaining my home. It doesn't hurt that those are two areas that guests are guaranteed to see, so it helps my home stay visitor ready on a regular basis.

I've talked before about doing the dishes, and how I struggle with it. It's not the lack of a dishwasher, because the dishes were never done at our apartment either. It's just a general dislike of doing the dishes. It's boring, repetitive, and ruins my nails. And up until recently, I wasn't a very good dish-washer, so I had to repeat a lot of my work.  So I brainstormed a few solutions. I set a goal of having the sink clear each morning. That helped a lot. Then I started timing myself doing a sinkload of dishes, and discovered that a full sink of dishes rarely takes longer than fifteen minutes. If we have a lot of company over, it's a little more, but on a daily basis, especially when I clean the making dinner dishes while the food is cooking, it can take as little time as five minutes! So now I know that I can burn through a stack in less time than it will take you to read this lengthy blog post. :-)

Then I started thinking about the bathroom sink. I love the look of a freshly wiped sink and polished faucet. The problem was, I would wash the sink on Mondays, and then not again until the following Monday. And while that was less than stellar with just Lover and I, once my brother moved in that became a real problem. Just around the time my brother moved in, it seemed we started to do a lot more entertaining, and even had a bunch of people staying with us. So I put on my thinking cap, and came up with the following solution.

One of the reasons I would let a dirty sink sit, was because I had to track down a rag, get out the cleaning products and wash the sink. Then I had to put everything away, and find a place for the rag to dry before I could throw it in the "to be washed" bin. Not a big deal, but enough of a deterrent for me to talk myself out of it more often than not.

A trip to Walmart yielded two brown washcloths for a dollar each, and a set of 3M Command Hooks. I grabbed some bias tape from my ribbon stash, and hand sewed a loop onto one corner of each of the washcloths.



This little corner of the vanity in our bathroom, that butts up to the shower curtain would be the perfect hiding place for my "sink-cloth".



One command hook later, this little nook held a washcloth at the ready for whenever the mood strikes to shine up the sink. The loop makes it easy to hang up and it dries all on its own while waiting for the next time I need to use it.





Plus, it is hidden from sight, so no one is the wiser to my little solution. Most days I just use hot water to spruce everything up, but I also made up a spray bottle of vinegar solution that hangs out under the sink for when I have an extra second to clean it up good.



So that's my solution for clean sinks. What areas in your home equal clean to you? I'd love to hear about them. :-)

Linked to Metamorphosis Monday, Make it For Monday,