Opening Doors - Part 2
The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry has become my mantra for this project, and any nascent old house renovator should be so forewarned.
It's been interesting to see how a door, so nicely fitted into its custom-made jamb on the bench, can suddenly expand its girth when one tries to stand it up and ask it to settle-in between two rooms. And just as frustrating is the opposite--when the door somehow pulls itself in and refuses to fill up the nice and cozy space you've made for it. If the door is too big for the jamb, carefully trimming a little fat off the hinge side of the door with a circular saw or bench plane will usually be enough to get it back in shape. (Trim the hinge side because resetting the hinges is easier than resetting a lock if it comes to that.) Closing extra space between the door and the jamb is a little trickier.
But before we get to how the door swings, we need to install the new jamb in the rough opening. The first step is to line the jamb up in the space so that the hinge side is plumb both on its face and its edge, and the top jamb is level. The lock side jamb is secured last in order to fit it to the door.
To be safe, I cut my side jambs a little long when making them and I had to trim their length to fit them into the rough opening. In one case, though, I missed the fact that the floor of the old house was not level and cut one side too short, falling prey to the "measure once, screw up" school of carpentry. You'd think that after two years of.... Ah, forget it.
Make sure that the jamb is centered between the walls, and if the hinge side jamb is not plumb by simply resting on the stud, you'll need to shim it. (I thought that rough opening was plumb when I made it, hmmm...)
To hide the nails that hold the jamb, it's best to place them in the center where they'll be covered by the doorstop. However, to hold the jamb more solidly, especially when using shims, I found it necessary to put two nails side by side near the bottom and top of the jamb. I set the nails so that I can fill and paint over them later. Use spacers when securing the top jamb, and again, shims to make it level.
Now, hang the door on its hinges and close it in the jamb. If all goes well, use a few shims to get the lock side jamb in line with the door, nail it in place, and you're all set. Of course, if all does not go well, then you're likely living in the real world and not the T.V., renovations of the rich and famous world.
For one of my door jambs, although it didn't seem so on the bench, I somehow managed to make the top jamb piece about 1/8" too long, thus making the opening a bit too large. Of course the jamb was already nailed in on two sides, so the thought of taking it out and unscrewing it just to shave an eighth of an inch off didn't seem reasonable. I shimmed it as much as possible to bring the jamb over to meet the door but this meant a barely perceptible bend in the jamb near the top (call that old-house character) and a lot of trial and error getting the right number and placement of the shims.
As you can see, not all jambs are created equal. And since I installed these doors, the temperature has fluctuated causing things to move enough to require some readjustment.
Not every task is a wrestling match, and somethings do actually stay in place once you've set them, but I suspect I'll be readjusting things around Chez Melendy for awhile....
