So where to start.. that is the question that we’ve been pondering ever since moving in. For some inexplicable reason, I remembered a comment my dad made when we were originally looking round the house about the years and years of gloss paint on the internal woodwork and how would we ever get a decent finish. With this thought in mind, I spent a lazy afternoon researching door stripping techniques and options. Despite whiling away several hours which really should have been spent more productively, my attentions turned to the door furniture we have.
No point in sorting out the paintwork on the doors I thought, given the state of our current door handles. Thankfully, we still seem to have most of the (presumably) original door furniture, although it’s in many places a sorry state of affairs.
Every internal door we have has a rim lock on it. We have none of the keys. As you can see from the pictures, some have been painted over, others are just plain knackered and we even have a matching brass affair for the front room.
So -what to do about all this then. My investigations moved to whether paint could be stripped from rim locks (in a similar way to paint from doors) and whether keys could be made up. I stumbled across: http://www.restorationblacksmith.co.uk/.
After a few days of emailing Luke the proprietor, I boxed up all of our ironmongery and posted it up to Derbyshire. Evidently – the ‘restoration’ (not sure if I will regret that term in time to come) has begun.
So – what first? Electrics? Plumbing? Damp? The problems with the render? No.. Door Handles. The story begins.
