The Drafty Door with a Jiggly Handle

I know you have all been there... you jostle the lock, turn the handle just so, tug the door, and then turn the key. All to unlock the stubborn door.

For us, the door between the garage and the house has always given us issues.  First it was just a "sticky" deadbolt. In order to lock the door, you had to yank on the handle with one hand, and turn the key with the other. Good luck if you were trying to carry anything!
And there was another complication: if you didn't lock the deadbolt, cold air would come whistling through the gap between the door and the frame. It was bad enough that you would feel a breeze unless the door was locked.

Bad turned to worse. Since I was pulling with all my weight on the handle, it started to become loose. I was worried that soon we would yank it off completely, as it had already started to jiggle.
Replacing just the handle would fix the symptom, but not the cause... I would have to realign the lock. 

First, to stop the arctic gusts, Dear Husband (DH) replaced the old, worn-out weatherstripping. You can see the old one (on the left) is crushed and can't flex back, where the new one (on the right) has plenty of wind-sealing spring built in.
The weatherstripping is designed to grip into a groove in the door frame, so just pry out the old one and shove the new in. DH even said this must be the easiest home improvement ever!








Normally if the deadbolt is just a smidgen off, you can file down the edge of the plate, but ours was so misaligned I would have had to cut out the entire left half.
Instead, I had to shift the entire plate over about half an inch. That meant I had to carve out more of the frame for the hole that the deadbolt slides into.
You may worry that removing all this wood could affect the integrity of the lock if someone tried to break in. Fear not, that steel plate (shown left) bolts into the door frame studs with 3" screws.

The decorative plate is then screwed on top of that. You can see from the final picture on the right, how far I had to move the lock over.

I know it isn't pretty, but I only had a utility knife to work with. Perhaps if we lived near Grandpa H (GPaH) I could have borrowed his woodworking tools. Oh well, hopefully no one will be scrutinizing our locks.

After that was fixed, I replaced the old jiggly handle with a new sturdy one. (This actually misaligned the lock again and I had to slightly adjust it again. 20-20 hindsight, oh well.)

You may notice something is a little... off. Yes, we bought a silver handle and kept the old gold lock. We will eventually be replacing everything with silver, and I didn't really want to change this handle twice! (Don't mind the dirty smudges around the door, ok? Nobody's perfect.)