Doors, Locks & Carpentry in Raleigh, NC

What is in an old Raleigh door

Raleigh has the widest range of housing we work in, and doors are where the difference between the eras is most physical.

Inside the beltline — Oakwood, Five Points, Hayes Barton and the streets around them — original doors have mortise locks. That means:

• A rectangular steel lock case, housed in a deep pocket chiselled into the edge of the door
• A face plate along the door edge, held by two screws
• A spindle hole through the face of the door for the handles
• A separate keyhole below it

A modern cylindrical lockset, which is what almost everything built since the 1950s has, works completely differently: a large round bore through the face of the door, a smaller bore through the edge, and the whole mechanism assembled through those two holes.

The two are not interchangeable, and that is the whole story of door hardware in an older Raleigh house.

Repairing rather than replacing

Mortise locks were built in an era when things were expected to be serviced, and they generally can be.

The common failures:

A broken spring. The commonest of all. The spring that returns the handle to horizontal, or the one that holds the bolt, fatigues and snaps. The handle then flops, or the latch stops springing out.

A worn follower. The square part the spindle passes through wears oval after decades, so the handle has play in it before anything engages.

Grime. A hundred years of dust, old oil that has gone to varnish, and whatever has been sprayed into the keyhole over the decades. A great many locks that are declared dead are simply seized.

A worn key. Old keys wear down and stop lifting the mechanism reliably. Trying a second key, where one exists, is worth doing before condemning anything.

The repair is to take the case out, strip it, clean it properly, replace what has broken and reassemble it with appropriate lubricant. Replacement parts for common patterns are still available, and a lock that has been serviced tends to go on working for a long time afterwards.

Handles and escutcheons are worth keeping too. Original hardware — glass, brass, cast iron — is part of what the house is, and modern reproductions rarely have the same weight or proportions.

If it genuinely has to be replaced

Sometimes a case is beyond saving. When it is, converting to a modern lockset is possible and it needs doing properly.

The mortise pocket has to be filled. A deep rectangular void in the edge of a door, right where the latch and any load concentrates, is a serious weakness. It gets filled with a solid timber block, glued and fitted tight, not with filler.

The old face holes get patched. With timber plugs cut to match the grain direction, not with wood filler that will read as a disc under paint forever.

The new bore is cut in the correct position for the lockset, which is generally not where the old spindle hole was.

Done properly it is invisible. Done casually it is visible for the life of the door, and the door is weaker.

There is also a middle path worth knowing about: mortise locksets are still manufactured, and fitting a new mortise lock into the existing pocket keeps everything where it is. It costs more than a builder-grade cylindrical set and it is far less work on the door.

Doors that have been painted shut

The other older-house staple.

Enough coats of paint and a door that fitted perfectly will no longer close, the hinge mortices fill up, and the hardware is buried. The answer is dealing with the paint — cutting the seal, easing the build-up on the edges and cleaning out the mortices — rather than taking wood off a door that is the right size underneath.

Where the house predates 1978 there is a lead question, and it is a preparation question: intact paint is not the hazard, making dust out of it is. Wet methods and containment rather than dry power sanding.

The 1960s to 1980s ring and the newer neighbourhoods

North Raleigh, Brier Creek and the middle ring have modern doors and cylindrical locksets, and the work is different:

Seasonal binding. Doors swell in summer humidity and shrink in winter. Planing in August gives you a gap in January, so the clearance gets recovered by fixing hinges and adjusting strikes rather than removing material.

Loose top hinges. The most common cause of a sticking door anywhere. The top hinge carries the weight, its screws lose grip, the door tips and the top latch corner binds. Longer screws reaching the framing behind the jamb lift it back to square.

Deadbolt strikes with short screws. Builder installations frequently fix the strike with screws that stop in the jamb rather than reaching the framing. Longer screws are a ten-minute change and the most useful security upgrade on most houses.

Hollow-core interior doors that have split at the hinge side or failed at the lock block. Some of that is repairable and some is not, and we will say which.

Trim and small carpentry

Original trim profiles in the older neighbourhoods are not sold anywhere, so damaged sections get built up or milled to match rather than swapped for stock. In the newer areas matching is straightforward.

Small carpentry — alcove shelving, boxing in a pipe run, a stair spindle, a window seat. Send a photo if you are unsure whether something qualifies.

Getting a price

For an old lock, photograph the door edge with the face plate visible, and the handle and keyhole on the face. For a sticking door, a close-up of the gap along the top and down the latch side answers most of the diagnosis.

Raleigh is about half an hour from us, with no travel surcharge.