Hope you had a great Labor Day. We split the day between family time and house projects, which is our ideal balance. This week will be hectic with book-related commitments nearly every day, but we managed to finish a couple of projects to share. We hope to be back to our normal pace next week, though we might be slower to respond to comments until then.
Back to the jamb project—or should I say jambs. The casings aren’t installed yet, we’ll be upgrading the leftover doorknobs to the backplated versions, and one door still needs painting, but it feels great to have two doors hanging on this side of the hallway. Lots of you wanted a full play-by-play, so below is how we installed jambs and hung both doors, including how we routed hinge mortises and cut the hole for the doorknob.
Until last week things looked like this. The open doorway to the laundry room wasn’t a huge issue—working in there was actually easier—but the plastic drop cloth hiding the storage room was unattractive and not very convenient.
Installing these two doors gave me a new appreciation for how much goes into a simple door. There’s more complexity than you might expect, especially once you consider the trim and hardware.
The doorway consists of the hardware (hinges, doorknob, strike plate) and three trim pieces: the casing, the jamb, and the stop. We planned to install all three.
We considered buying a pre-hung door for the laundry room, which comes already set in a jamb and saves the trouble of cutting hinge and latch recesses. But we couldn’t find one that matched the look we wanted for the storage-room door, and the slab door price was hard to beat. Plus the laundry-room door was a reuse, so we would have had to build a jamb for it anyway. We decided to build a jamb for the existing door first, and if it went well we’d repeat the process for the other door.
We didn’t build the jamb entirely from raw lumber—Home Depot sells inexpensive jamb kits for doors up to 36″ wide (our doors are 32″).
The kit includes three pre-cut pieces—two sides and a head—with a rabbet cut on the end of the side pieces so the top piece can sit into them. Our kit needed a little trim to fit the framed opening, so I cut the non-rabbeted end down to size.
We propped the door on scrap wood on the garage floor and laid out the jamb pieces around it so gravity would help while assembling. I fit the side pieces first and trimmed the head to fit.
To size the head, I measured from jamb edge to jamb edge and subtracted a bit to account for the rabbet and left roughly 1/8″ clearance around the door so it could swing freely.
Next I mortised the hinge recesses in the jamb so the hinge leaves would sit flush. Since the hinges were already on the door, I used the door as a template, transferring hinge locations to the jamb and tracing the hinge outline.
I bought a compact router for this work and an appropriate bit. Routing by hand had been slow and imprecise in the past, so the router sped things up and improved accuracy.
I practiced on scrap wood first. Freehand routing wasn’t neat, so I clamped a scrap guide to the practice board and used that as a template—the results were far cleaner.
When I routed the actual jamb the first cut came out great.
With both hinge recesses routed, I nailed the jamb pieces together, using 2″ nails through the side pieces into the head at the rabbet joint.
We dry-fit the jamb into the laundry-room framing. This was before we finished the backsplash—one of those projects squeezed in between door installs.
The fiddly part is getting the jamb plumb and level on all sides. We shimmed under the hinges and behind the jamb where needed, checked everything with a level, and then nailed the jamb into the framing.
With shims supporting the door I screwed the hinges to the jamb to hang the door. The first attempt was a little tight in the top corner. After rechecking levels we added a couple more shims at the top corner to bring it plumb and the door swung properly.
Once the door closed smoothly we installed the strike plate and nailed the stop molding in place around the jamb.
I was happy with how the first door turned out, although the process wasn’t particularly fast.
After finishing the backsplash and counter, we tackled the second door. The glass door still had its protective plastic on. This heavier door didn’t have hinges, so I routed mortises on both the door and the jamb and used three hinges for extra support.
To speed up the hinge routing I made a template from the practice board and used it to guide the router for each hinge location on the door.
With the hinge mortises cut on the door, I propped it up and held the jamb in place to mark hinge locations on the jamb. I added shims at the top early to avoid the tight-fit issue we’d encountered previously.
Using the template made routing the hinge recesses on the jamb quick and accurate.
We assembled this jamb the same way—nailed it together, shimmed and leveled it in the opening, then fastened it. With Sherry’s help the second door went up faster, and it worked perfectly. There were celebratory high fives and a little goofy dancing.
The door still needed a knob. I used a $19 door lock installation kit that helps position the cross-bore and latch holes precisely. It clamps to the door and uses the strike plate location as a guide. It’s not a heavy-duty jig, but it provides the right drill bits and simple instructions to get the holes in the right place.
Following the kit instructions, I drilled the main cross-bore for the knob and the smaller bore for the latch. The kit left one detail uncovered for our particular knob: routing a shallow recess on the door edge so the latch faceplate sits flush. I routed that freehand and will tidy it with filler before priming and painting.
The result was satisfying: both doors hung squarely, closed securely, stayed open when latched, and looked nice even with their protective plastic still on.
Because the hardwood floor didn’t extend all the way under the doors, I installed a couple of hardwood pieces as a small threshold. It looks good and should work with the future storage-room flooring. I wish I had extended the wood an inch further into the laundry room so the tile didn’t peek through, but small misalignments like that are surprisingly common—maybe nobody will notice once everything is painted and finished.
We plan to spray-paint all the trim and install casings when we tackle the rest of the room. We also ordered two matching doorknobs with decorative backplates so these doors will coordinate with the rest of the hallway.
After the laundry-room door went up we finally did a mountain of laundry and it was noticeably quieter with the door closed. Best of all, we don’t have to wrestle with that plastic drop cloth for the storage room anymore. It’s a small change but it made a big difference.
It’s exciting to see this little addition nearing completion. It’s easy to feel like it’s taken a long time, but this room wasn’t even drywalled a month ago, so the progress feels significant. As Dory says: just keep swimming.