The Sweet Married Life: Locks and Keys

So we moved into this house slightly more than a year ago. One of the first tasks on the to-do list was to re-key all the doors for several good reasons:

You never know who may still have a key to the house, the old owner, her friends, a realtor, a contractor, etc.
Every door is on its own key, so I literally have 5 keys that I have to carry all the time [I'm not counting three other security gates that also have their own keys. freaking janitor over here.]
Every knob is a different metal and style.
All of the doors require keys to exit the house, creating a serious safety issue in case of fire, and also creating a situation in which I literally locked myself into the entryway and had to call R to come home from work to let me out (that was a fun conversation).

The Problem

I called a few locksmiths, and was quoted a rate of around $800 to replace all the locks. Shockingly, we did not embrace the estimate, and instead forgot about it until now. Since then, I discovered Kwikset's "Smart Key" products. The deal is supposed to be that you can easily replace the knobs, and then magically rekey to whatever key you want, so that all the new locks take the same key. I've been eyeing it for some time, and finally decided to go for it. I got two new knobs for the two security doors and one for the kitchen door, which should replace three keys with one new one. (Not perfect, but progress). I decided not to rekey our front door, which is thicker than normal. I also didn't mess with our security gates, which will need some other adaptation (we don't want people to be able to just reach through the gate to turn the deadbolt).

Inside of the kitchen door to start-

I had to wait until the weather warmed up a bit- this isn't a great winter project, but I didn't want to wait until spring. Then it was as easy as:

1. Remove the old knobs & prep doors.
This was pretty quick. There's a bit of a trick to taking off a door knob, and of course, without the instructions for that model, you have to figure it out yourself. This one had tiny screws that I needed a super tiny screwdriver to loosen. Mostly, it was pretty quick and easy. While the knob was off of the kitchen door, I decided to take the opportunity to quickly paint it. The door was painted brown, so it's been on my list to repaint white to brighten things up a bit.

old hardware removed

2. Install the new ones.
The box has instructions that are really easy to follow. The difficult part was that the old knob seemed to be somewhat jerry-rigged into place, so it was easy to get the new one on, but then it didn't quite line up correctly with the door frame or wouldn't quite catch. After just a bit of work, everything fit together.

with a quick coat of paint and the deadbolt on top

the knob attached and working

3. Rekey.
With all three of the new knobs installed, we just took their little magic tool to switch everything over to fit one key. If we need to rekey again in the future for some reason, it'll be really easy to do.

4. Repeat.
We did the same process on the two security doors (minus the painting). Which resulted in these lovely pictures. (ignore the crappy outside paint. it's on the list).