Hi friends! We’ve been trucking right along in the new house, and I’ve got several updates we’re working on but not quire ready to share here. One of the items on our list, as should be with every new house, is to change out the locks. We actually had an issue with a door on our inspection and the old lock wouldn’t go back onto the new door, so while we were changing locks, we decided to just go ahead and change the front door and all of the exterior knobs to what we wanted. Because we’re now in a larger neighborhood and living in a small city, safety is of utmost importance. To be quite honest, when we were living in Myersville, I quite honestly kept my car unlocked with my wallet in it too many times to count. (If my parents are reading this post, they are cringing at my behavior right now.) The door to the house would remain unlocked all day and only be locked when we all went to bed for the night, and there were sometimes nights that didn’t even happen. However, I knew with this move to a more urban area (if you can call Greensboro urban), I would have to be much more careful. Today I want to share with you the choices we’ve made to make our house exterior more aesthetically appealing as well as safe. (This post contains affiliate links.)
Let me first remind you of what the exterior of our 60’s ranch house looks like.
To be perfectly honest, I was not in love with the exterior of this house at all when we saw it, but I did see potential, and I have plans to make it unique and ours. I will have to share the more exciting paint plans later, but for now, let’s talk about that front door. This home is a 60’s rancher with a very traditional door. In fact, everything about the home’s exterior is traditional, from the white trim to the black shutters to the brick exterior. If you read my blog, you probably read it because, like me, traditional is not your thing. However, because we had bigger fish to fry, we decided to wait on replacing the door at first; that is, until we tried to install a new lock and it was just not working with the door and frame since both were rather worn. That led us to change our decision and order a new door immediately.
I thought about ordering a midcentury style door to suit the era of the house, but it’s not exactly what I wanted. I knew for sure that I wanted glass panels in the door to let light into our otherwise dark entry. We decided to head to Lowes and check out what they had, and found we were both drawn the craftsman style door. While it’s not the style of the house, it does provide clean and modern lines which will suit our exterior plans well. Not to mention, the price was right! This door was a total budget find at just $330!
It’s ready to paint, but I think I may try to use Java Gel on it and see if that gives it a wood look. If not, I’ll simply paint over it. My friend Maryanne treated her garage doors with gel stain and they turned out beautifully! Hoping for the same results, and I will certainly keep you posted.
Now let’s talk about the door knobs, safety and convenience. I am slowly changing the hardware around this house to mainly black with touches of gold. I knew I wanted all of the knobs to be flat black, and I wanted an easy to use keyless deadbolt. I first read about the Schlage Connect in this article, where it was recommended as a great fit for an Air BnB. While I am not planning to make our house an Air BnB any time soon, I did want the best and easiest to use smart deadbolt. I chose this lock for so many reasons…
- I keep the doors locked during the day now, and when the kids get home, it’s easy for them to key in a code, rather than remembering to always carry a house key. (One less thing for them to lose!)
- It can connect with Amazon Alexa, which we have. I can easily just tell Alexa to lock the door.
- There’s an app you can also use to lock it. I can’t tell you how many times I get in bed and wonder, did I lock the door? Now I can just grab my phone and lock it with the app!
This lock also comes in the flat black and modern look I was going for. Check out the deadbolt below:
It has looks, too! Of course, as you can see, it does have a key in case the batteries every die, or anything like that. Once we had this deadbolt selected, we decided to get Schlage locks on all the other exterior doors (there are 4 others) so that we could have one key work on all doors.
Now, I first searched my local hardware stores for knobs and didn’t find all of the pieces I needed. I then checked Amazon and found what I needed there, but I found the same items with better prices at Build.com. Plus, if you signed up as a new member of their email list, you received a 5% off coupon code. I had everything in my cart that I needed at Amazon for a total of $340, but when I put the same items in my cart at Build.com with my code, my total was less than $300! I wanted to pass that on to you because that ended up being a pretty big savings, and they offered free shipping. For the regular keyed entry knob on the front door, I chose this Schlage Plymouth with a back plate because it looked a little “fancier” and we’s fancy on the front door. (Improper grammar is purposeful, in case you are doubting my English language skills). We also have 4 back doors which generally remain locked so we didn’t need the keyless deadbolt like we did on the front door. I ordered 4 of these simple matte black Schlage deadbolts. Finally, I ordered 4 of these simple matte black Schlage knobs to complement every other piece.
Our door will soon be installed and finished and I will share it with you as soon as I can. I did want to pass along my finds for now. I’m committed to creating this home on a very tight budget and plan on passing all of my finds to you as well. Just wait, because I soon have the most amazing dining room chandelier to share with you, and I paid only $75, and it was not even on sale!
So now, scroll back up to that photo of my home, and picture it with me…. Dark painted brick, white trim (basically everywhere that is white is staying white), no more shutters, and a wood look door. Can you see it?
