Door handles

If you are familiar with Hanshill, you recall the interesting door latches on the interior doors. There is a horizontal strip of wood, about the size of a paint stirrer that raises up or lowers into a latch that is on the door frame. A leather string (shoelace) is tied to the strip of wood. The string passes through a hole drilled in the door, to the other face of the door. To open the door, a person pulls on the leather string to raise the little wood strip to the unlatch position.

Here are photos of the original design, although this particular door has black nylon rather than leather.

Daddy made the discovery that the leather laces had a tendency to rot and break at stress points. He addressed this two different ways. One was to replace the leather with black nylon, as you see above. The nylon is much more durable. The other solution was to add a pull handle to do the strength work for the leather lace, thus reducing the stress on the leather and giving it a longer life. Oops, this handle really needs to be re-furbished!

So we wanted to have similar wrought iron pull handles on the new doors in the house. However, extensive searching at local stores and on the internet did not turn up the same handles as were already here. So we went with a different design, but one that seems to blend well with other materials in the house. We had to place the handles off to the right, toward the door center, because these handles screw into the door from the back side. If placed directly below the hole for the lace, the screws on the back side would interfere with the little wooden piece that raises and lowers.

 The two doors that lead into/out of the sunroom both have the new handles, plus there is one on a door to the new guest bathroom.

After I had ordered the three new handles, I discovered that we had a similar one, just smaller in length, on the screen door between the eating and drinking porches. So definitely we stayed with the flavor of the original. Here's the older version. However, the old handle has the screws on the same side as the handle, not on the "back." Gosh, there are so many things we notice or learn as we go along, that are not always immediately apparent!

Finally, yesterday Brad did not have school because it was Election Day and the schools are used as polling places. He borrowed Elmer Loving's tractor with the bush-hog attachment and had a fine morning mowing pastures. Since it was his first time manipulating this piece of machinery he stuck to fairly flat areas. He hopes to continue the process and cover most all of our pastures, as he gains a little more confidence. At least he has the good sense to fear the tractor turning over on top of him.