Latches

A couple of weeks ago I received complaints that the door from the garage to the carriage house wouldn't open.

I quickly tried it a couple of times with no success and declared it out of scope for the party.

I didn't want to get into yet another project, because I had a feeling...

And I was right.

As always, it's never easy.

I devoted some time over the weekend to tackling the problem.

After messing about for a bit I still had no luck and decided to take off the doorknob so I could see what was going on.

Regardless of what I did, the latch wouldn't fully retract. I even took off the casing on the interior of the door and tried various tools to force it.

Eventually I ended up removing the hinge pins and taking the door off completely.

Then I could remove the entire latch mechanism.

This must be a common failure because the big box stores stock the specific replacement part for the failed component.

It's sad that we have fully functioning 100+ year-old door latches, but these modern ones, that I installed, break in less than 10 years...