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

Jun 01, 2021
so tommy here's the problem here is a staircase to the basement when we got here there was no

door

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

door

that 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 up here, there's also a huge gap at the bottom and the floor is slanted, so, yeah, I just felt that I needed help, yeah, well, first of all, the first thing I noticed is that the door is upside down and backwards, so if I look at the strike right here, the beveled part of the strike will allow the door to go in.

opening

by pushing that in, but you have some 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 turn the door up the right way and then add a piece to the bottom of the door.
how to fit a salvaged door in an existing opening ask this old house
You are now ready to work. Okay to start, we need to remove the door, so we're going to take out the hinge pins, take it outside to remove all the hardware. Now we have the door in the correct position. What I want to do is place it in the

opening

, but I want to push it up. to the header to see how crooked the header is, hold it tight, that's good, there now you can see the gap at the top of the door, there's a gap here and it comes down to nothing there, which tells me that the

house

is settled.
how to fit a salvaged door in an existing opening ask this old house

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how to fit a salvaged door in an existing opening ask this old house...

On that side, what I want to do is cut the door to follow that angle, so I'm going to place my scribes in the widest space on this side here and now let's just continue along the dam, let's take it outside and cut along along that line and That way the top of the door will be parallel to 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. Let me show you what I did. outside, I actually took a piece of wood and held it against the top of the hinge and marked its length to be about an eighth of an inch longer than the door to give me a gap between the top of the door and the bottom. bottom of the 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 indicator block, so now I just pull the hinge and we can reference all of this without measure. the casing or jamb is great, so I hold my indicator block tight against the header, take the hinge and hold it tight against the bottom of the indicator block, lining up the edge of the hinge with my reference line.
how to fit a salvaged door in an existing opening ask this old house
Now I'm just going to drill a hole and we can put in our first screw okay now we can remove it and we're going to bring the door closer and hang it nice so now we're going to put it right above the hinge and now we're going to mount the bottom hinge okay use my block indicator with the reference line, slide it out a little bit, right there, drill a hole and screw it into position, okay, now what we can do is close the door and see how it fits in the opening, okay, The gap at the top of the door is good, we have a larger space on this side, so now what I have to do is fit these hinges to allow the door to go in that direction.
how to fit a salvaged door in an existing opening ask this old house
Okay, the next thing I want to do is check the The distance under the door to the floor is three and a half inches. Now we know that the floor is sloped up, so what we need to do is open the door and then measure from the bottom of the door to the floor and we have two and three quarters. inch, so the maximum padding we can put on that side is two and five-eighths, which gives us a little bit of room. We close the door, we will have a small space, but not that much. Sounds good, okay, let me.
Mortise these foreign hinges to extend the height of the door. I actually glued a continuous strip to the bottom of the door. I glued it and screwed it to the rail in the middle. Now styles will expand and contract this way over time and with some time. year they may stick out from the end about a sixteenth of an inch, but they will always return to this dimension when conditions are the same as now, but when you paint the tent I don't want it to look like that. one continuous piece I wanted it to look like the style and the rails, so I'm going to create a faux seam to match the rail.
I'm going to do that with my utility knife, I'm going to make a couple of strokes, so now when you paint the door, it's going to look like the styles are coming completely fine, so the next thing I want to do is install the mortise that goes here to keep the door closed. in the opening, now the mortise that you have on this The door is actually for the different swing of the door. We need the bezel to go inward so that when you close it it closes and then snaps open. What I want to do is open that box to see if I can turn the latch.
Well, now I don't want to lose the spring. I'm going to see if I can get him out of here completely. I'll just turn it over and put it back in there. Go put the Replace the cover and we're in perfect business now let's reinstall the hardware. Okay, it's ready. Yes, bring it. Okay, Garrett, try it. See how it works. Perfect latch. another amazing job thank you very much

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