apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

It's possible not everyone has seen this, but I know it's been done a lot in years past, all over craft tv, as a fun way to wreck perfectly good vintage doorknobs. Yeah, some of them are already broken or common enough, but when I worked in a salvage shop 3 years ago, I was internally having a fit over someone swiping some pairs of fairly uncommon beautiful brass doorknobs to ruin to never be doorknobs again so her closet could fit her bored rich housewife DIY thingamabob... there are some things that do make me grouchy. About $350-400 of irreplaceable beautiful vintage solid brass doorknobs inside of a closet until she got bored again worth of grouchy.

Mostly it's the LOOK! this isn't that new.

I check Apartment Therapy every week...and I was happily surprised today when I saw a familiar photo! I work at Community Forklift, the home improvement thrift store mentioned as the source of materials for the doorknob shelf. I was quite impressed with the customer who did such a nice job building it (he told us how he did it - see http://communityforklift.com/creations.cfm). It was fun to see it on my favorite site!

I do have to respectfully disagree with KTG. I know how much stuff goes into the landfill every day instead of coming to shops like ours (Building materials make up over 50% of the US waste stream, by weight, if you can believe it). All the time, beautiful historic houses get smashed to bits instead of being carefully deconstructed so the materials can be donated to places like ours.

So I'm just happy whenever anybody sees value in preserving an old material. Whether it's used for the original purpose, on a door, or if someone finds beauty using it another way, I'm just happy that someone saw fit to keep it in use (To be frank, I'm also happy to have the revenue coming in. High-demand items like knobs and antiques pay the rent, so our nonprofit can continue our environmental mission: to divert perfectly good 2x4s and cabinets and other mundane items from the landfill).

For what it's worth, our prices are the same no matter how the customer uses them - starting at $5 for rusty steel knobs like the ones used in the shelf, and going up to $35 for glass knob sets (occasionally more for a highly ornate brass knob).

--Ruthie

No, this type of DIY isn't new to most of us, but I'm glad this hardware was repurposed. I'd rather see old things loved and out in the world rather than in a drawer someplace where no one can appreciate them while they wait for a period-appropriate-project to come along. This particular doorknob coatrack is little rustic for me, but I wonder if using the vintage doorknobs with a slicker bit of wood or something more polished might be a new look for it.