Me vs door locks

I finally got around to replacing all the locks on the house. Yeah yeah, I should have done it ages ago. Was going to replace all the door knobs too but I decided enough was enough after the front door knob considering how much I was spending just on the locks.

I received them yesterday and have attempted to install all of them.

The original deadbolt on the door down to the garage was a quicky, home done job and not *quite* to modern standards. The hole for the bolt was drilled in crooked so one side of the lock barely engaged (and only if I removed the trim around the lock), and the recess for the plate is about 1/4 too small, so the new lock plate doesn't sit flush. The door had a fatal crack along the side not because it'd been kicked in like I'd thought, but because someone did a lousy job at installing the dead bolt orginally and it caused the door to crack. Something catches internally too because bad drill job, so fully unlocking the door is a major pain. Thankfully I don't have a need to lock that door much.

The back door went fine, no problems. The front door, not so much. The deadbolt just wasn't working right, until I figured out that I'd installed the interior thumb latch upside down twice. D'oh!

The door knob on the front door, aye. I've a pretty little cast iron decorative plate underneath a modern ugly cheap and worn door knob. I want to keep the plate, and use this latch. Turns out the old modern knob only works because someone tweaked the door and plate in the horizontal direction, widening both by that 1/4 of an inch on each side to allow the screws to pass through. My problem? The screws on the knob I'd bought are mounted in the vertical direction and those tweaks had been made horizontally. There was no way I could canniblize the old stuff and/or reconfigure the new stuff to work either, I tried. I'll have to take the door off its hinges to drill out 1/4" on each side or buy a new door knob.

And the down stairs side entry.... It has always been a tricky door to close, but it isn't used too often. The door knob wouldn't latch, and you had to lean on the door to latch the dead bolt. Replacing the lock was easy. The bolt just wouldn't fit into the latch plate in the jam any more, no matter how much leaning you did or jiggering. And of course the latch plate in the jam had rounded off screws so I couldn't move it easily. Back to the old lock we go . . .

Final Score: Me 2, Doors 2.