Builders Share

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....

Handyman

Opening Doors - Part 1

Why pass up the opportunity to recycle a metaphor?  In this case, though, opening door refers to the noun.  That is, a door that opens instead of gets stuck.  The picture on the left should give some insight as to what it takes to get an old door to fit into a new space, and that's what I've been up to.

In most renovation projects, adding a door means a trip to the building supply center to pick out a pre-hung door that's trucked home and carefully installed into a rough opening.  For Chez Melendy, though, I'm intent on preserving as much of the original house as I can, and even though I knocked down all the walls on the second floor in order to change the layout, I want to put the original doors back in place wherever possible.  This means having to build 6 new custom door jambs.

So for me, the trip to the building supplier was to pick up some 6" wide finish stock, and since I'm planning on painting the upstairs trim, I bought pre-primed stock to save a step later, with minimal price difference to the unprimed stuff. 

Once home, I had to rip the boards down to the thickness of the new walls plus 1/8" to accomodate 1/16" of skim-coat plaster on each wall surface.  For any given door, I then have to cut the side pieces to fit the rough opening, and then cut a 3/16" rabbit into the side pieces about a 1/4" from the top--just enough to give that joint some strength for "door slammin' time."

The top piece of the jamb is cut to allow about 1/16" inch on either side of the door, and then it's screwed into place.  A couple of scraps are then screwed onto the jamb to hold it in place for sizing-up where the hinges will be placed.

The door then gets layed on a couple of saw horses so that the jamb can be placed around it, and a couple of roofing nails are put in place as spacers.  (Wood screw were what I had within reach, but they're more likely to leave marks in the new jamb.)

Once the door is snug in the jamb along with the spacers at the top, I mark where the hinges need to fall on the jamb.  I make marks for the top and bottom hinges, and then lift the jamb away from the door and clamp it up on its side in order to chisel away the spaces where the hinges will set.

To mark the borders of where I'm going to chisel, I lay one half of the hinge down on the jamb between the marks I've already made for its placement, and draw around the hinge using a utility knife.  Then I remove the hinge and, still using the utility knife, carve out the boarders of where I'm going to chisel.  This helps prevent over-shooting the mark later when I'm chiseling.

Once I have the hinges so they're flush with the jamb, I mark where to drill some pilot holes for the screws, and mount the hinges on both the door and the jamb, paying attention to keeping the hinges square.

Now I'm ready for a test fitting.  I place the jamb back over the door and insert the pins into the hinges.  With the door fitting well in the jamb, I'm ready to install it to the rough opening.

In Part 2 of Opening Doors we'll install the door and see how things change between "door on a bench" to "door in a wall," and learn a little lesson about tolerances.

--Thanks to artist and cabinet maker Matt Brown for showing me the way in making these door jambs.

Handyman