Blake Style Thumb Latch Hardware: Interior Door Installation and Latch Bar, Catch or Keeper Fixes

Hits continue apace on my two posts on thumb latches, which you can find by clicking on the "thumb latch" category along the righthand side of the home page under Topics. Today, I am making a third post on the topic, showing two things at once:  1) how a thumb latch is installed on an interior door, and 2) how a thumb latch can be tinkered with if it is not catching or latching properly.

Fair warning that I did not install or tinker with this latch. It seems to have been repaired a couple of times, but prior to me. In my mind's eye, I see Martin, the previous owner, up here with his ball peen hammer, sinking in a little silver nail to help the latch latch.

This is called a Blake style thumb latch, which according to Ed Donaldson Hardware Restorations,

were manufactured by most of the major hardware manufacturers for many years. Patented in 1842 -- this type of thumb latch could still be found in some form in catalogs for about 100 years.

In any case, without more ado, here is the outside of one of the bedroom doors upstairs ...

Close-up of the thumb-latch handle from the outside:

Now, close-up of the handle and the latching mechanism on the edge of the door ...

That mechanism is inset into the edge of the door, like so ...

Here are a few more clear views ...

Here's where the repair comes in. You see a small nail underneath the latch bar, keeping the latch bar high enough so that when it is pulled closed, the latch comes up and over the hook or catch or keeper on the doorframe.

Here's another view:

If the  nail wasn't there, the latch would stick under the keeper, rather than being in position to slide up and over ...

So that's one fix. There is another, which is to tinker with the position of the keeper. That has happened to our bathroom door, and I will do another post on that soon. In any case, here are a series of close-ups showing how the keeper is countersunk into the doorframe. 

You can see, just below it, another place where an earlier keeper was countersunk lower down in the frame. God knows when or why, but that's what I love about old houses. There's such a sense of unwritten, lived history.

And now, again, a series of photos showing the latch bar latching.

And now closed, the inside of the door. Don't mind the odd top hinge ... another fix for an old door.

And there you have it. An old thumb latch for an old door.

Martin's Inventions: shower curtain pullback

Here's another of former owner Martin's inventions. There's no doubt, absolutely none, that this is a man's inventiveness at work. No woman would ever allow this to happen on her watch, I'm guessing. I wouldn't. And, once the bathroom is gutted hopefully later this week, it will be gone forever, alas. I've let it stand because it works, because I didn't have another immediate solution, because I knew we were renovating, because it's probably been here since Martin's wife died, and perhaps most of all, because it has a certain elegance and even a kind of aesthetic charm.

It makes me happy to share it. It's another of my favorites and really needs no explanation:

Martin's Inventions - Coat Closet Light Pull

The former owner lived in this house for 60 years, and lived within a mile of the house his entire life. He and his wife and children loved the house and their love of the house is visible.

I never met Martin. He died before we bought the house. But his care of the house is so present that I often feel that he and his wife Marguerite are just around the corner.

Writing about the porch today -- they had the porch floor replaced with mahogany, one of the reasons it is in such good shape -- made me think about the other lingering presences in the house. I call them Martin's inventions. They're whimsical, smart, inventive, funny. They make me feel as if I knew him, just a bit.

Here is one of the best -- the light pull in the coat closet.

Of course the house is so old that most of the closets have old-fashioned chain pulls, rather than switches. The coat closet is deep, though, and impractical to step into, given the piles of shoes and other stuff that always seems to clog its doorway. But no worries, here is a handy lightpull: