Doors

How about some home improvement updates? While it isn't anything horribly exciting, we recently had our exterior doors replaced. Here are some before and afters...

The main front door:

Interior before... notice the lovely stained glass window... the panes are sitting in our basement if you want them. This door was a pain because you needed a key to lock and unlock it, even from inside. And it swelled in the summer so you couldn't lock or unlock it at all. (It was locked for three months.)

New door! With locks that work easily! Now that the door functions we took some furniture out of that space - it used to have a small book shelf and desk, and can actually use it as an entry way.

Here's the old door from outside... 

And the new front door we can actually use!

The secondary front door - next to the garage:

This is the door we use most often - the coat hooks were cleaned off to get ready for the door guys.

The new door works great and lets in a little light.

The old door from outside, this is where most everyone came into the house and probably still will after nearly nine years of building the habit.

The comparison would be better if I had taken the photos from the same angle, oh well. Here's the new door.

The patio door:

This door goes out to the back patio and yard - it's an important one because it is the door we use to let the dog in and out 95% of the time. The dead bolt on this one stopped working a while ago so we had to keep the door knob locked and try not to lock ourselves out when we used the back yard.  A nail in the frame for the storm door would frequently work loose and the door would get stuck on it, making it impossible to open or close. That was fun.

The new door, also in working order, it's amazing how happy this makes me.

And the patio door from outside... 

The new door is pretty and functional, and, so far, we never have to be worried that it won't open!

We also replaced the door that leads into the backyard from the garage, but I didn't take before pictures of that one... the door was actually splintering and warped at the bottom from the weather exposure. All the doors we replaced were original wooded doors and were about 60 years old. The new ones have a lifetime warranty, so this is one project we're hoping to be sort of done with forever. 

Now we just need to replace all of the (46!) windows, repave the driveway, renovate both bathrooms, have the roof replaced, finish the basement...