Morgan's Nesting Instinct

Anyone who knows us knows that Morg is a far tidier person than I am. I drive him crazy with my tendency to leave books, magazines, shoes in entirely inappropriate places. So it shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that his nesting instincts have kicked in much earlier than mine.

I just didn't expect them to kick in via a fixation with door knobs.

Another aspect of our lovely 90-year old house is that most of the door knobs do not work. They are original glass knobs, very pretty except that some previous tenant was overly sloppy when painting. And well, they don't work. They don't turn, doors don't latch. Our bedroom door didn't actually have a knob, just a hole in it where the knob used to be. Since we tend to lock our cats in our bedroom when we have guests, we developed a crude but effective system: a rope was tied around the hole, while at the other end of the rope, a second loop could be fastened around the door knob of the closet, just outside our bedroom. Of course, the closet door doesn't latch either, so a pile of dumb bells are lined up at the base of that door to keep it, and our bedroom door, closed. Yeah. Of course that only worked if you were outside the bedroom. To "latch" the door from the inside, you just need to locate a pile of stuff to prop in front of the door. The second bedroom (aka, the "nursery" - gulp) had a knob that sort of latched, but realistically the door was only ever held shut by the fact that it had been painted so many times that when it was closed, the top of the door wedged itself into the door frame - you had to bang on the top of the door in order to open the door from the outside; to open it from the inside, you had to hook your fingers over the top of the door and bear down to unstick it. House guests love this, I'm sure.

Early on, we tried looking at salvage yards for parts to repair them, but had no luck. But Morgan decided that this system would really not work once the bug arrives, so we carried ourselves off to the hardware store this weekend to buy some new door knobs and a template to drill new holes for the knob mechanism (the original knobs were much smaller than modern ones). Our bedroom was the easiest, since there was no malfunctioning knob to remove. The second bedroom was harder and required a lot of prying and banging to get the knob off. The top of door also had to be planed before it would shut properly. But we now have two functioning door that open and close and latch and lock. Its remarkable.

Next up: the closet door in the froglet's room, currently held shut by another pile of dumb bells.