Replacing Interior Door Levers with Emtek Helios

Door hardware update! It’s the little things like this that bring me so much joy. When we moved into our loft apartment we focused on major renovations rather than little details. I reused our old door handles but now I’m ready for an update. The old handles were basic and covered in scratches and paint. They felt flimsy and were probably 20+ years old. Ideally, I wanted to update with matte black door levers, but to do this I’d also have to change the exposed door hinges. Then I quickly remembered the pain we went through installing our new bathroom door and getting it to be level and swing without squeaking really loud, so I decided for classic stainless steel to match the hinges.

Let’s discuss all the doors in the photo above. The doors on the left are for our laundry, they are dummy handles which means they don’t move, you just pull and the doors open. These doors generally stay closed except on laundry days. The door directly across from that is a closet. We store our coats and shoes here. The door in the middle leads to our small downstairs bathroom, in an ideal world I would have installed a sliding pocket door here, but in our loft there are pipes, electrical and sprinkler pipes running everywhere so sadly this wasn’t possible. So we opted to install a door with a glass panel to break up all the doors and make it easier for guests to know which door was the bathroom.

For our new door levers, I went with Emtek brand. We installed the Helios style on our front door several years ago, so I went with the same style for our interior doors with the same square rosette backplate. Side note – If you want to read a funny story about why I changed our front door hardware check that post out over here. (It involves me getting locked out of the apartment in my pyjamas.)

We only have a total of 3 interior doors in our loft. And they’re all crammed in this small area by our front entrance and I was getting sick of looking at the dirty old levers so it was time to update.

It’s subtle in the photo above, but the old levers were a blue-grey aluminium that didn’t match the stainless steel hinges, the new Emtek Helios levers now match the hinges! In the photo below you can see a close up of the 2 different metals, I love the warmer look of the Emtek levers and the fact that there are no screws on the front face of it. It’s a cleaner look, especially in an area where there are so many doors.

For me, it’s the little details such as door levers that can really elevate and update a space. Think about your kitchen knobs too, switching those to brass, gold or matte black in a more modern style can completely change the look of your kitchen without a major renovation.

I installed these levers by myself with no professional help, the instruction manual was straight forward and it actually isn’t as hard as it seems once you see all the parts in front of you. The only tricky part was the latch strike plate. Our doors were fitted for drive latches, this means they didn’t have a notched out plate and are built a bit different. I had to notch out an area for the plate to fit into using a hammer and a chisel. This was my first time doing something like this, I went right to youtube and watched how to do it, seemed easy enough and yes it was a bit time consuming, but I did it! I later discovered that if you have existing drive latches, Emtek makes that style, you just have to request it when ordering from your hardware store, whoops! No regrets though, I learned something new about door hardware and I can now say I know how to use a chisel (kind of)! (below is a photo of my mess, the key was to go very slow and shave a tiny bit at a time)

Here are some of the other Emtek door levers I love, find them all on the Emtek website