it is like having a new door

We have 6 doors to the outside word, 4 of which are downstairs. A legacy of the house’s history as unsavory rental property, half of the doors were completely inoperable when we got the house. This weekend we opened one of these for the first time…

The newly opened door is one of the 3 that open onto the porch downstairs. In the beginning, this particular door was completely boarded over on the outside, for good reason — the only lock is the original hardware and that isn’t secure at all. We’d removed the board a while back when we figured out that the door had been screwed shut, but the door had become to us an unchanging, unopening part of the wall. On a whim, though, we started pulling the screws out and realized that it would be pretty easy to have this be a fully functional doorway for us.

The hard part, actually, was buying the deadbolt. We picked up a lock at the same old Richmond hardware store at which we found the stripper. Pleasants Hardware, like other Richmond classics, due almost always to a very special rhythm of customer service, can have these strange, slow moments when it feels like you might never be able to leave.