What Is on the Door of a 1950s House Here, and How Much Life It Has Left

Stern & Price laid out Rancho Rinconada on the flat ground near Stevens Creek and put up 1,562 houses between 1950 and 1953. Most of them are 800 to 1,000 square feet. They went up fast, to a short list of plans, and the door hardware was bought the way everything else was bought on a job that size: in one order, from one supplier, in one finish.

That is why the doors on those streets are so alike, and why a technician who has taken one apart has effectively taken three hundred apart. It also means the answer to what is on your door is knowable before anyone arrives, which is unusual and useful.

What arrived with the house was a keyed knob on the front door, a plain passage knob on the back, and frequently nothing at all on the door between the garage and the kitchen. Deadbolts were not part of the order. Where there is a deadbolt above the knob today, an owner added it in the seventies or eighties, and you can usually tell from the finish that it does not match.

Inside the outer knob is a brass plug with five pins in it, a spindle running through the door, a latch with a half-inch bevel on it, and a handful of springs. Nothing about it is unusual and nothing about it is unobtainable. Springs, spindles and set screws for hardware of that period are still made, and a technician who works these streets carries them.

What has changed is the mileage. A front door gets opened and shut something like eight times a day, which over seventy years is a couple of hundred thousand turns. Three parts take that: the plug wearing against the shell it turns inside, the spring under the latch losing its snap, and the key itself, usually brass, usually a copy of a copy of a copy.

First, put the key in slowly and watch it. It should slide to the shoulder in one movement, with no lift and no jiggle. A key that has to be pulled back a hair before it will turn is telling you that either the plug or the key has worn, and the cheaper of those two to replace is the key.

Second, open the door and push the latch in with your thumb, then let it go. It should come back out with a snap you can hear from arm's length. A latch that returns slowly, or has to be helped, is a tired spring, and it is the failure that leaves a door looking shut when it is not.

Third, take hold of the knob and try to move it toward you and away from the door. A little play is normal. More than a little means the set screw has worn a flat into the spindle, which is a ten-minute repair now and a knob that comes off in your hand later.

Fourth, and most important, look at the jamb. Open the door and take one screw out of the strike plate. If it is three-quarters of an inch long, it is holding in the jamb only, and the jamb is thin trim nailed to the framing behind it. Nothing about the lock matters more than the length of that screw, and it is the cheapest thing on this page to put right.

A knob set from 1951 that passes those four tests is generally good for another decade, and there is no reason to take it off the door. Hardware from that order was made heavier than most of what would replace it at the same money. The parts that fail first are the ones that can be replaced with the set still on the door: a spring, a spindle, a set screw, a latch.

What ends it is wear in the plug. When the plug has worn enough that a neighbor's key of the same brand will turn it, or the hub inside has rounded so no spindle drives it cleanly, or the case has cracked, then it is a replacement at $129 to $339. Even then there is a good case for keeping the original knob on the inside face, where it is seen every day and is doing no security work at all.

The keys are usually in worse shape than the locks. Each copy drifts a little from the one before it, and after five generations the cuts no longer lift the pins to the right heights. Cut a fresh key from the best original you own rather than from the worn one in your pocket, and test it on the door before you put the old one away.

Rekeying puts new pins in the cylinder you already own so that a new key works and every key issued before today stops working. It is $29 to $47 per cylinder, with the second and third at the low end because the van is already at the curb, and the $89 service call counted once for the stop rather than once per lock. Nothing is bought and nothing on the face of the door changes.

It is worth saying what that does not buy you. New pins do not turn a 1951 knob into a deadbolt, do not deepen a strike pocket, and do not lengthen a three-quarter-inch screw. About 39 percent of the occupied homes in this city are rented, and these small houses make up a fair share of that number, so on this tract a lot of locks have passed through several sets of hands. Rekeying settles the question of who holds a working key. It settles nothing about the door.

A deadbolt with a full one-inch bolt, fitted so the bolt lands in the middle of a strike that is screwed through the jamb into framing. That is $129 to $339, it goes on in the same visit as a rekey, and on a house of this age it does more than any other single change. Three-inch screws in the hinges at the same time cost nothing extra and stop the leaf from dropping again.

An 800-square-foot house on these streets usually has three exterior doors: the front, the back, and the side door of the garage. Three cylinders, one key, one visit, one figure said on the call with the hour already inside it. Ninety days on the labor, written on the receipt rather than implied.