Disaster resolved: patching those holes in my door

Sometimes DIY really tests your patience. Sometimes it feels like a never-ending series of problems that beget more problems and you wonder if you’re just the most incompetent person in the world. Our toilet saga has been like that. And I’m here today to share another project that should have been quick and easy and turned into the bane of my existence. You’re not alone in thinking that sometimes, DIY is a real bummer.

A few months ago, Naomi and I shared a “Disaster Confessional” where we revealed that we both had some major holes in our houses. Hers are 12 holes scattered throughout her house where she hasn’t installed new air vent grates since her renovation wrapped up many moons ago:

Mine are three holes in the exterior basement door, creating a wee bit of a security hazard:

Or rather, mine were three holes in our door — I finally fixed them. FINALLY.

We were dealing with two issues: 1) We wanted to install new keyless locks on our exterior doors, and we were successful on our two doors upstairs but the hole for the basement door was too small to fit the new lock mechanism (oftentimes older homes have this issue), and 2) The basement door had multiple locks on it to begin with (thus creating multiple holes) but the seller removed them in order to pass a pre-sale safety inspection and then never replaced them. To remedy this disaster, I needed to find a way to widen one of the holes, and then patch the two in a secure manner.

Fixing this stupid thing involved a ridiculously long parade of failures (I don’t sound bitter, do I?). The parade unfolded as follows: First, I bought a new drill bit large enough to widen one of the holes to the size needed (the standard 2 1/8″). But when I got it home, I discovered that the shaft of it was too large to fit in the chuck of my drill. So then I bought an adapter that I thought would fix the issue, but it did not. So then I bought a new hole saw attachment that would fit in my drill. But I couldn’t use it because it was intended for drilling new holes from scratch with a pilot bit in the center to keep the saw in place as it spins, and since I was enlarging an existing hole the pilot bit had nothing to bite into to keep it in place. (photo below in case that made absolutely no sense)

So then I had to go back to the hardware store to buy a kit with a guide that clamps onto the door to keep the hole saw in place. Of course the first store I went to was sold out of the kit I needed (even though I’d seen it there the previous day when I bought the hole saw with the pilot bit), so I had to try a second store. Finally I tracked one down and brought it home.

It took quite awhile (like 15 minutes) to drill through the door, but when I could finally see my fingers wiggling on the other side I was beyond excited (by which I mean, I yelled something like “*$&!#@$* FINALLY.”).

With my new standard-sized hole, I was able to install my keyless lock. It’s a Schlage keyless deadbolt (affiliate link — read our policies) and then upstairs we have Schlage keyless lever locks (affiliate link — read our policies) on the front and back door. It’s so handy because now all our doors are programmed with the same code, and we can also add (and remove) additional codes as needed (so we can make ones for guests, service people, etc and then revoke them if we want without having to change our personal code).

I did have to chisel out some space for the new strike plate, since it didn’t line up with the old strike plate. But that was pretty easy to do with a screwdriver and hammer.

That still left us with two gaping holes in the door, though. I really wasn’t sure how to fill these, since they were pretty big. I did some online research and saw lots of suggestions for various epoxies that could work, but then I asked someone at a hardware store and they suggested just using wood filler. That sounded easy enough to me, so I just packed a bunch of wood filler into the holes and let it dry:

Then I sanded it down so it was relatively smooth (I wasn’t too concerned about appearance, since it’s the basement and the door is already less-than-charming). To finish it up, I touched up the holes with black paint to match the door, and then installed little handles to make it easy to open and close (since it’s just a deadbolt, there’s no handle attached to the lock itself…I could pretend this was intentional, but truthfully I just didn’t really think that one through when I decided to go with the deadbolt version and by the time I got it installed it was months later and I couldn’t exchange it). Here are the inside and outside of the door now:

Okay so it’s not the prettiest thing in the world, but it was one of those projects where by the time I reached the end I was so fed up that the choices were either to call it “good enough” and move on, or burn down the whole darn house and find somewhere else to live. At least our door locks now and there aren’t a bunch of holes in it. That sounds like victory to me.

 (Sharing at Tip Me Tuesday)