…for your home.
I’m pretty easygoing when it comes to customer supplied items. You want to pick out (and pick up) the tile? Fine by me. Have some antique locksets with ornate glass knobs found at a flea market for your nineteenth century Victorian? I’ll get right to work. Ready to update hardware store quality hinges and doorhandles for some trendy black ones that came in a 30 pack for less than a dollar each? After a lesson hard learned, I’ll have to pass.
My hard lesson
I learned a hard lesson on a remodel. I came into the job halfway (things didn’t work out with the previous contractor), and replaced the remaining half of the room and closet doors in the home with slabs, and used the customer supplied hinges much like the ones linked above. The quality difference between these, and even the cheapest ones from Lowes is immediately evident. But half of the doors already had them, so why not? The closet doors were all bifold, thus not affected. But three interior doors needed to be replaced. The finished openings were non-standard, so the doors required trimming. This is not unusual. On the first two of these, I didn’t get it right the first time, and had to go back and trim again. I thought I was losing my touch! Took a little longer, but they came out fine.
But wait, there’s more
For the third one, I decided to just rip the whole thing out and go with a pre-hung: If it’s going to take me that long to do a slab, I might as well just go with a pre-hung–the extra cost of the door will be more than offset in reduced labor. I blamed the non-standard openings, and maybe the fact that it’d been a while since I’d done one. Well I’ve done plenty of pre-hung, and the install went as expected. Until, that is, I swapped out the brand new hinges that came with the assembly for the black ones, to match the rest of the remodel. Well wouldn’t you know it, the perfectly installed door immediately started to bind against the jamb. Clearly the problem was the hinges, but I felt a compulsion (irrational in hindsight) to make it work. I thought about just painting the original hinges, but dammit, I wanted everything to match and work as promised. So I spent an inordinate amount of time fiddling, shimming, and massaging the mortises, and got them in. Looked and worked flawlessly. And I spent hours of extra time that I could not justify charging for. But it was for a longtime customer, and she was happy.
The moral
So here’s the bottom line: Even if those hinges were free, I could install a really nice set of solid brass hinges (I don’t even use this kind in my own home) for less money than installing the crappy no-name ones. And client and myself would both be happier. Go with the cheapest ones at Lowes, and save a bundle, while still getting a decent hinge.
So maybe you’re DIYing your remodel, and you’ve got more time than money. I’d still recommend steering clear of the no-name rubbish. The frustration simply isn’t worth it.
–Wilson