TAGS
My wife and I just bought our first house. It is about 40 years old, but is in surprisingly good shape. One of the first things we did was replace all of the door knobs on the doors that go outside. However, once we got to the front door, we ran into a problem. That’s right, as the title of this post suggests, the front door knob did not have any screws on it for removal…
I guess technically it does have screws for removing the latch, but those did not affect the rest of the doorknob. It turns out that doorknobs like this are pretty common in older houses, and you usually only have to find a slot behind the interior knob, and push in on the slot with a pointy object while simultaneously pulling on the knob. This I did, the knob did come off, but then nothing else would budge. It turns out that our door knob was of the Schlage brand, which used to implement a little tomfoolery with their knobs. In addition to the slot, they also include a little wire that you must depress to remove the knob’s rose (the big round part that is flush against the door.) Pushing/leveraging the wire in will probably work best with a very small screwdriver (that’s what I did) or a straighten-out paperclip (per Mo’s comment below.) Click the images below.
After pressing the wire in, I had to put a knife blade under the rose to pry it off, because it was a little bit stuck to the door’s wood stain, but it took very little force. Here are the pictures of the knob before and after removing the rose:
That’s right! There were screws under the rose! It was all a cinch after that. Just unscrew the screws, and pull the knob out from the exterior side of the door. Normally, the inside part and outside part will separate and pull out in their respective directions, but this old doorknob was pulled out entirely from the exterior side of the door. The latch pulled out simply after removing its screws. Here is the new doorknob that we replaced it with:
.
