A long, long time ago (2011, to be exact), I did a quick fix on my front door hardware with some spray paint when I did a faux wood finish on it with gel stain.
I probably didn’t prep the surface very well, and I really should have sealed it with something. In any case, it hasn’t help up very well in the last 4 years.
I was considering giving it another makeover, when Mike decided he’d had enough with the improper latch and announced that he wanted to replace the hardware completely. Fine by me!
We went to Home Depot to look at lock sets. I’ve perused this area before, so I know they can be expensive. Fortunately I cam prepared by finding a few on Amazon first to compare prices. We ended up getting this Kwikset Smartkey set on Amazon for about $40 less than the equivalent at HD.
I was intrigued by the Smartkey feature which would supposedly allow us to keep our current keys. Modern technology!!
The install went a little more smoothly once I started helping – it’s just easier with a second pair of hands. You can also use painter’s tape to put things in place temporarily. Unfortunately, for some reason, our new latch would not like up with the strike plate. We couldn’t figure out why since – except that maybe the hinges had warped. But it was likely that this improper alignment was the source of our nagging latch problems before. We ended up shimming the hinges and sanding down the bottom of the door a bit to get everything to fit. Generally speaking, the easiest solution is to just move the strike plate…but ours wasn’t off THAT much. So instead we spent about 6 hours shimming and finagling until we got it to work. Oh well, lesson learned 
I think the final result was SO worth it.
Oh, and the SmartKey feature was super easy and effective – we didn’t have to replace our keys. Now we just have to fix all the cat scratch damage on the bottom half weather stripping (replacement is really the only option) :/ The fun never ends!
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