How to Fit a Salvaged Door in an Existing Opening | Ask This Old House

so tommy here's the problem here is a ladder to the basement when we got here there was no

door

and i had two little girls and i didn't want them to just run down the stairs and fall so i went down to the basement and found a

door

that It matched the rest of the doors in the

house

but as you can see it doesn't close quite right so I had to mount

this

lock here too there's a big gap at the bottom and the floor is sloped so oh yeah I I felt like I needed some help yeah well first off the first thing I notice is the door is upside down and upside down so if I look at the striker right here the beveled part of the striker will allow the door to go into the

opening

pushing that in but you've got a little bit of tape there and the tape actually allows the striker to come in when I hit the jamb um and I also noticed that

this

rail here is the wide part of the railing that it actually belongs to at the bottom of the door , so what we need to do is flip the door up the right way and then add a piece at the bottom of the door. we'll take out the hinge pins take it outside to remove all the hardware so now we have the door in the correct position what i want to do is put it in the

opening

but i want to push it hard into the header to see how crooked the header is hold it tight that's ok there now you can see the gap at the top of the door there is a gap here and it narrows to nothing there which tells me the

house

is sitting on that side what i want to do is cut the door to keep it going that angle, so I'll place my scribes in the wider space on this side here and now just go along the dam, let's take it outside and cut along that line and like that, the top of the gate it will be parallel with the jamb now because we are turning the door inside out.

I have to reverse the hinge like this, okay, let's put the door here for a second. Now let me show you what I did. outside is actually I took a piece of wood and held it against the top of the hinge and marked the length to be about an eighth of an inch longer than the door so I had a gap between the top of the door and the bottom bottom jamb i also want to mark the distance from the edge of the hinge to the face of the door so i put a reference line on my gauge block so now i just pull on the hinge and we can reference all this without measuring casing or jamb are great so i hold my gauge block against the header take the hinge and hold it firmly against the bottom of the gauge block aligning the edge of the hinge with my reference line now i will drill a hole and we can put in our first screw ok ok so now we can remove this and we'll bring the door in and hang it ok so now we'll just put it in the hinge ok there and now we'll mount the bottom hinge ok use my gauge block with the reference line slide it out a bit drill a hole and screw it into position ok so now what we can do is close the door and see how it fits into the opening ok ok the gap at the top of the door is ok we have a bigger gap on this side so now what i need to do is fit these hinges to allow the door to go that way ok the next thing i want to do is check the distance between the door and the floor is three and a half inches.

Now we know that the sleeping floor slopes up so what we have to do is open the door and then measure down from the bottom of the door to the floor and we have two and three rooms. one inch so the max padding we can put on that side is two and five eighths that gives us a little bit of space we close the door we'll have a little bit of space but not that much sounds good ok lemme fill in these hinges on the outside to extend the height of the door I actually glued a continuous strip to the bottom of the door glued and screwed to the rail in the middle now the styles will expand and contract like this with the some time and some time of the year they can stick out from the end almost a sixteenth of an inch but they will always come back to this dimension when conditions are the same as now but when you paint the tent I don't want it to look like one continuous piece I wanted it to be look like the style and the rails, so I'm going to create a faux seam to match the rail. if you paint the door it will look like the styles go down nice very nice so the next thing i want to do is install the mortise that goes in here to hold the door closed in the opening now the mortise you have on this door is actually for the different turn of the door we need the bezel to go in so when i close it it will close then open so what i want to do is open that box to see if i can turn the latch right now not I want to lose the spring.

I'm going to see if I can get him out of here completely. I'm just going to flip it over and put it back there. flip it back on and we're in perfect business now lets reinstall the hardware ok voila yeah bring it right garrett try it out see how it works latch perfect tommy you're amazing you fixed the latch it looks right on the door frame. another amazing job thank you very much