With the addition of the pantry door to the hallway, we ended up with three different styles of doorknobs. Two was bad enough, but three made me twitch.
So I picked up new doorknobs for the five doors in the hallway that needed to match the new pantry doorknob. I was so excited to show you how easy it is to switch out doorknobs! Usually it just involves unscrewing the old pieces and installing the new. Unfortunately, my doors had a little problem:
Do you see it? The new knobs have a rectangular latch and my doors have a round hole. I was so discouraged that I gave up and went to pout for a while.
Then my husband happened to be at Home Depot getting stuff for the pantry, and he found a tool designed to fix our doorknob problem!
It’s the Ryobi Door Latch Installation Kit. It cost $10.
One side has this blade that’s the perfect shape for the new hardware:
and the other end has a little blade that carves out the door so the latch can sit flush:
I undid the existing knobs, which is easy… just a couple screws.
Then I lined the tool up in the existing hole and gave it some serious whacks with a rubber mallet. It cut the perfect edges for the new hardware to fit into.
Then I used the other side of the tool to carve out the spot. My doors are made of cheapo material, and this was my first try, so you can see I got a little carried away and ripped some of the MDF past where it was supposed to be. I got better at this and was able to do other doors with no goof-ups.
After I got it carved out deep enough, I installed the new hardware!
All that mess from where I carved too far was easy to fix with a little paint.
Anyway, I had to share the discovery of this little tool, because it saved us! All five doors in the hallway match now. Twitching crisis averted!
Comments & Reviews
Thanks for the post! I had the same problem.