For the usual historic reasons, the exterior doors on our house all have different knobs with different lock orientations (and keys), so it’s difficult (for me, anyway) to verify they’re locked with just a glance. The correct solution of replacing all the knobs seems like a great deal of effort & expense for very little benefit.
This is easier, albeit considerably less stylish:
When the twisty thing aligns with the label, it’s locked:
No matter what orientation it has:
The scars in the paint show some of those doors have sported many knobs over the last half century or so.
You’d think such a thing could be standardized, but nope.
If we lived in a fancier house, I probably couldn’t get away with it.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 
Comments
3 responses to “Door Knob Lock Orientation”
[Grin] Had a little of that. The current place used a low quality knockoff of a third-tier lock brand, so replacing the locks had no resistance. Still a few mismatched keys around, though I’ve since learned it’s cheap for the locksmith to match a lock to a key. The oddball lock? Maybe, one of these years. It’s only been 19 years… [grin]
I’m a little surprised that the arc of aesthetic considerations didn’t bend toward a minimalist line…
I had the labelmaker in hand, looking for the vertical bar character, when the ambiguity of having it mean both “Locked” and “Open” depending on the orientation paralyzed me.