The Saga of The Front Door

      Our tale starts in late 2020, when we began work on the front doors, as well as several windows, thanks to financial support from an SHF grant. Damage to the wood of the door and frame was repaired, broken panes of glass were replaced, and everything was painted. All of this work was completed quickly, but our progress came to a screeching halt as we waited for the new panic hardware. We needed this to bring the front doors up to code, but it turned out that the hardware was severely back-ordered. Eventually, after a months-long delay, we were excited to get everything installed, with the expectation that our front doors would be ready for another hundred years of use.

 We were woefully mistaken.

       When we installed the new hardware at the beginning of our season in 2022, we suddenly began having problems getting the door to latch. One heavy spring rainstorm later, the wood was so swollen that nothing we could do would allow us to lock the front doors. Our contractor attempted a series of adjustments and was finally able to get the doors to latch so that we could safely lock the building. Unfortunately, the doors latched a little too well and couldn’t be released from the outside.

 It turns out that the 100-year-old pine doors and the 140-year-old building in which they reside are all completely warped. When we tried to install the new, perfectly straight panic hardware into warped doors in a warped frame in a warped building, it was doomed to fail from the beginning.  

After a summer of entering via a back door and then unlatching the front doors from the inside, we received a micro-grant for brand-new doors. While we try to preserve and restore the original parts of the building as best as possible, sometimes that isn’t an option. In fact, the pine doors were not the ones that were originally installed in the building in 1882. They were more likely installed sometime during the Courthouse’s tenure as a school. The new doors are constructed out of sustainably sourced mahogany, but utilize the existing glazing and replicate the historic doors in all details.

Thank you to the Colorado State Historical Fund for helping us wage this war against our own front doors!