Those are beautiful, Mari. Have to disagree, those porcelain knobs look very pretty, imb! Great patinas on the pieces. So he left these all behind you are saying?

Very nice indeed!

Wow, those are beautiful. What a find. Did you know they were in the shed or did you just stumble across them?

Chris

Squirrel - oh, by "they're nothing special" I just meant I already have about 20 sets of them! LOL That's what's on virtually every interior door in the house. They're original and very nice. Good to have an extra backup set just in case one gets broken though. It's pretty badly stained so I need to do some research to see if there's any way I can clean it. One of the previous owners just chucked the old doors into the shed and left them there, and I'm not sure that our PO even entered the shed at all. Some of the junk in there is pretty scary!

Chris, I knew there was one set in there (the far-left set) but the others were lucky finds as I was leaning the nasty rotting doors against the wall to take to the dump.

There's little that's original to the house left, and very very little that's up there on the "cool factor" like this, so it was pretty exciting to emerge from the garage with a boxful of pretties.

Those are great!! I've bought hardware like that to add some interest to my boring 1970 house. Almost the day we moved in, we ripped off all the clamshell moldings and baseboard. Then we replaced all the luan doors with 4-panel doors, and the hunt for doorknobs was on. They're all white porcelain, but the escutcheons are all different. Since the house doesn't belong to any historic time period, I just bought whatever I liked. Some are the vertical metal style, some old round ones, including an eastlake or two, and some are old rimlocks -- I love these!

(Later we changed all the ugly slider windows with true-divided lite double hungs, installed hardwood floors, wider window and door casings and baseboards. Now you can hardly tell it's not an old house!)

I love old houses. Yours must be beautiful!

I love the detail on them - too bad no one makes hardware with such graceful details any more.

Sky

That is one awesome find! Were you able to salvage hinges, too?

Those are really beautiful, even the one with paint. Such nice patinas. You have given me an idea of perhaps finding some non matching pieces of hardware and making up a little framed vignette to showcase them to hang on one of my walls. The floral doorknobs are so beautiful. Thank you.

There are no matching hinges, sad to say; there are a bunch of plain lift-off hinges, a mixture of ball-tip and bullet-tip, which match the other ones in the house. I couldn't get those off, those need DH's strong hands and possibly some paint remover. The things that are already detached can go in a crockpot with water and dish detergent overnight - the paint just peels off after that.

egganddart, no, it's not beautiful yet. It's rather cute but it needs a LOT of work to get it back to beautiful... sadly, it was a failed flip attempt on the part of the PO, who was not an accomplished DIYer, and a lot of the work on it was FUBAR. He also had no concept of the things that make old houses so charming - for instance, every one of the beautiful original windows went into a dumpster, to be replaced by ugly vinyl windows (installed off level, natch). Finding this hardware is wonderful since so much was simply thrown away.

Old door hardware is my favorite, and those are great!!! I wish we had some more stowed away someplace here!
We have some similar Eastlake hardware among an eclectic range of styles throughout the house--including a lot of japaned hardware. My husband just cleaned the paint off the hinges and latch on the LR built-ins and we now know they're japaned so we're a little closer to being able to determine when the A & C features were added to the LR.
For those who are interested, old door hardware turns up in a lot of places, like resale shops, flea markets, antique stores of course, and even occasionally at Habitat for Humanity ReStores.
Johnmari, I've been wondering how you're getting on after reading about some of the surprises you've had since moving in. Those are part of the OH experience, although that knowledge is of little use to you when you're dealing with these issues, unfortunately. But we've all got our horror stories, believe me. We're taking stucco off the 34' tall east brick chimney and it looks like the top couple feet of the underlying brick will have to be redone *or* we'll have to shorten the chimney--and it started out that I was merely going to prep the stucco to paint it...just the latest of the jobs that invariably mushroom out of control.

I was hoping so much that you'd be able to find some of the beautiful fixtures that *must* have been part of that house before Home Depot Man got a hold of it. Those are a delicious taste of maybe what waits somewhere in the attic? Maybe you'll end up on "If Walls Could Talk"? :)

I am so envious of you folks with ReStores! Since this is a very low income area there are a lot of junk shops, I can pop a spare backplate and the small rosette (since it needs a matching key escutcheon that wasn't on that door) into the glove compartment. Unless I'm really stuck, I'd prefer to avoid the architectural salvage guy down where I used to live because he is viciously overpriced - like $100 for a single doorknob that was one of about 50 matching ones, not exactly rare and unusual - and very disorganized. I may take more photos and scan rubbings and send them to some other places that sell old pieces and offer hardware matching.

Kim, right this minute we're in the "this sucks this sucks this sucks this sucks i hate this house will someone please shoot me NOW" mode because it's slurping down money like a kid with a frappe - milkshake, that is. Between last week's and this week's disasters we're expected to hit $10k, all "WTF??" expenses, not the expected ones. We were counting on having additional expenses, but we were expecting to have some proceeds from the other house to buffer them. Right now I have a plumber (overpriced franchise plumber, but my regular plumber doesn't have the right equipment) downstairs snaking tree roots out of the sewer line, since we had a huge backup last night. We're also extremely peeved with our home inspector for how many things he completely missed.

flyleft, we've already been up in the attic and down cellar to find absolutely nuffin in the "If Walls Could Talk" genre. I found traces of a hideous "country blue" wallpaper in the master bedroom - PO painted right over the electrical outlet plates and stuff so if you take the plates off, around each receptacle is a little border of blue wallpaper. Around a defunct cable outlet (no cable attached to it anymore) I tried soaking and peeling some back. No, it's stuck right on there something fierce. So, when we get to that room we'll sand off all the paint boogers and drips, spackle and feather off the seams, and then either skimcoat and paint or put up wallpaper w/liner. *gasp* DH is much more amenable to wallpaper in this house, since it "fits the house", as long as I choose monochromatic or unfussy patterns like most of Bradbury's "Morris Alternative Fills" line. But that's a ways down the road: we need working sewer, properly working electric, fully working heat, etc. before we get too far into "pretties". (I admit I have spent a little bit on "pretties" though: we got wood blinds for the LR because keeping DH in clothes is extremely difficult ;-) , rods for my cheapie eBay curtains, slipcover for my wonderful new couch which people were fighting over last weekend, and a couple of cheap secondhand furniture pieces. I'm still looking for a mailbox and the mailman is getting a little irritated with us!)

We do believe that the large brass chandelier in the dining room is either original or very close to it - it's heavy as all get-out, can tell ya that much. If we take it down it'll be hung up in the attic wrapped in sheets for safekeeping. I did pick up, at a yard sale, two antique pan chandeliers: one looks very much like Rejuvenation's Belmont. The other looks sorta like this. I paid $15 for the pair. KGW had a chandelier restored for a surprisingly low price, I think at JF PeGan; I'm thinking about sending them over and seeing how much a complete restoration would cost. The little two-light would go beautifully in the entry. I'm not sure I like the large one as well, maybe I'll have it restored and sell it (depending on how much the restoration goes of course).

Lovely hardware! I can just imagine how great they will look in your home.

Yikes! I'm really sorry to hear that these unexpected problems have appeared. You didn't have much of an 'OH Honeymoon,' did you? I don't know what to tell you except hang in there and things will get better.
There is apparently a large outfit in Kansas City (can't remember the name) that sells salvaged hardware, but we haven't been there or tried to see if they have a website. You may want to check it out. We were told about it by the owner of a motel in Kansas that we stayed at--the office of the motel was in an old house with great fixtures and we started gabbing with the owner about old houses, etc.
We have two original pan light fixtures that don't have shades and I'm going to get champagne colored bulbs for them someday in the near future to give them a little more 'finished' look. They're the kind that don't have any way to secure shades, so it would appear they were never meant to have any. At $15. a pair, it sounds like you got a good deal on the antique pan fixtures you got!

I'm jealous...All I've found in my OH is an 8 track player and three 8 tracks :oP And dead mice...

Perhaps I needed to buy older than 1977? :oP

Hey igloochic--when we were working on the attic this summer my husband found a small 'art deco' tin box of condoms buried underneath the old insulation! There was one unused but very petrified one still rolled up in a band inside the tin. It is a bit mind boggling to think it may have been up there since the addition was built about 1926...

Mari - our house insurance covered tree root damage to our sewer lines - worth checking out. Saved us $12,000!

Neat finds. I want to kill our POs grrrrrrr.