The little things...

Hello! Happy second week of the new year! Are you pounding away at your new year "to-do's"?! We have a bunch of "little" stuff we are troubleshooting and one of those things is the side door....

Pretty high end security? Eh? We thought so too! I mean we have our alarm, motion detectors, and various other security options, but the side door leading into the garden room was always a worry. So when Schlage contacted us about their decorative collection to see if we would give it a try, we were game. We picked the Satin Nickel - Georgian. This is where I drop off and hand you to Joey because he was the one who did the instal and can give an actual account of what happened!

So here's what we got. Most of this you need to complete the project and some of which you dont. First off, you're gonna need the front and back sides of the actual door unit. Then we have the knobs themselves. The little doohickey that pulls in and out to allow entry into your home. A 9V battery for making the flashy lights go "beep". Keys are always good to have for when it enevitably runs out of battery unexpectedly. A little pushpin to help set in the outside doorknob. (At least, that's what I used it for) The new shiny plates the"doohickey" slides over and into. And let's not forget the screws that make a trip to the hardware store unneccessary.

After you have relished every moment of ripping your old door knob out of it's old home there are only a few quick steps to getting to this point. 1. Seperate the two halves of the unit. 2. Take all the protective stickers off the new fixture. 3. Become perplexed that your new door knob has wires. 4. Install the "Doohickey" (Pictured below on the right) into the old "Doohickey's) space. I didn't have to do any new drilling or routing and you probably won't either. These are pretty standard pieces. 5. Plop the 2 halves of the knob on the correct sides of the door and secure with the screws provided. That will get you to this point. The only semi-brain-power-using part of this was finding where those wires were supposed to go. You see 'em. The two smarmy looking guys looking like Medusa wig rejects jutting out the right side of our newfangled "Doomawhatsits" We'll get to where they fit in momentarily.

What you gotta do (and I know this isn't super obvious with the photo) is pop the wire from the front side through the square hole on the backside before you secure the two into place. Then you twist the wires around until you can latch them together. You'll know they are connected when the unit makes a beep of life. I heard this beep 6 or 7 times since i had to disconnect and reconnect them multiple times to find the right way to hook this up. Then you have to shut down the part of your brain that says you are about to break something and cram these wires into a tiny crevace in the side of the unit. Like so!

Once you've accomlished all that, you are basically home free. Everything is still loose and needs to be screwed together, but it's all there. Below is the front face still needing to be fastened tightly to the flip side.

This is the inside the house view after completion.

This is the outside the house view. On a scale of 1-10 of difficulty. 1 being putting on bunny slippers and 10 being escape from alcatraz with no use of your hands. This lands just above a 1. Not only because my scale is ridiculous, but because other that taking a bit more time, this is an extremely easy install. unless you need to route out a new space for this unit, everything should just fit right into place.

It's Lana again! The way Joey explained it, it looks like something I could have done with out him! I love, love, love the new knob! It's already proven useful a dozen times because of the habit I have with leaving my car and dropping my keys into my massive bag while balancing a million files as I walk to the door. Yes, I am a mess. I loose my keys between the car and the door. Totally worth the $200 bucks to me.