Hang A Door, step by step

Hope you folks had an excellent Labor Day. We split time between family and house projects which is fairly much our sweet spot. This week is going to be especially hairy thanks to having book stuff nearly every day, but we did manage to eke out a few things to share and hope to be back to normal next week (might not be as on top of comments until then either).

But back to my jamb. Or should I say my jambs? They do not have casings yet, the leftover doorknobs will be upgraded to these backplated-versions, and one door still needs to be painted like whoa – but boy does it feel good to have two doors hanging on this side of the hallway. And because a bunch of you requested the full play-by-play, here is how we brought in jambs and hung both doors – complete with details on carving out a spot for hinges and a doorknob.

Until last week, things have looked like this. The door-less laundry room was not a big deal, since it in fact made working in there easier. But the plastic drop cloth closing off the storage room was less than fairly and less than convenient.

Installing these two puppies gave me a whole new respect for doors. They are a relatively complex operation, at least considering how much I took them for granted.

On top of the hardware (hinges, dooknob, strike plate) the doorway itself was made up of three separate trim pieces. All of which we’d be installing.

We debated purchasing a pre-hung door for the laundry room (one that comes already placed in a jamb, which saves you from having to carve out spots for the hinges and knob) but we had trouble finding one that matched the style we hoped for the storage room door, plus it was hard to beat the price on the slab (aka: not pre-hung) version. And since the laundry room door was an existing door that we are reusing (it used to lead to the storage room), I’d be stuck making a jamb for that one anyway. So we chose to attempt making a jamb for that already-owned door first and if all went well (or at least okay) we’d proceed with hanging the other door from scratch too.

Well, not totally from scratch since Home Depot sells these $19 jamb kits for doors up to 36″ wide (ours are 32″).

Besides coming in three pre-cut pieces (two sides, one top) the pleasant thing about the kit is that the two side pieces already have a rabbet joint cut on one end so that the top piece can sit nicely across the two. Ours needed a slight trim to fit into the framed doorway, so I was simply careful to cut it off the non-rabbeted end.

We propped up the door on the ground using some scrap wood so I could construct my jamb with gravity on my side. I leaned the side pieces in place, but could not place the top piece until it was cut down a little bit.

I measured the width from jamb-edge to jamb-edge, but had to account for both the fact that it was sitting in the rabbet joints (so it’d need to be a little shorter than my measurement) and that I hoped to give it about 1/8″ of breathing room around the door too.

Once that was cut, I began the process of mortising/routing out the spots for the hinges on the jamb – since they need to be recessed into the wood to work. Since they were already attached to our door, I marked where the hinges should go on the jamb based on their door placement.

Once I had marked where on the jamb each one should go, I used a spare hinge to trace out the shape that needed to be routed out.

I purchased a compact router for $99 at Home Depot (it is called a Rigid 1-1/2 HP Compact Router) and an $18 bit meant for work like this. I had done some of this work by hand before and it was not especially fast or especially precise, so I chose it’d be worth the investment this time around.

Before taking my new router for a spin on the jamb, I practiced on a scrap board first. My freehand attempts were not strong, so I began clamping some other wood scraps as sort of a guide. You can see how that worked out for me on the routed hinge spot on the far left of the board below. Muuuch cleaner.

When the time came to make my official first cut on the jamb, it came out excellent (if I do say so myself).

With both spots for the hinges cut, I could nail my three jamb pieces together. I used a 2″ nail through the side pieces into the top.

Here is the jamb that Sherry and I pushed loosely in place within the framed door to the laundry room. You can see that we began the process of hanging this door before we did any of the backsplash (took us a while longer to tackle the glass one).

The next part is the most persnickety: getting every side of the jamb level and plumb. We did our best, adding shims – especially under the hinges – to assist us adjust things where needed. Once we were satisfied, I nailed the jamb into the door frame on all sides.

I lost Sherry to Teddy at that point, but thanks to some shims under the door I could hang it myself by screwing the hinge into the jamb. Here was the moment of truth.

The moment was a bit of a whomp whomp because it did not work. Sad trombone. It was a little tight on the top corner.

I checked all my levels again, and it turns out that the top corner had slipped out of plumb when we turned our attention to the bottom. So I shoved a couple more shims in there to correct it and things were back in working order. Now that the door closed well, I could attach the strike plate (where the door latches), and nail in the stop molding around the jamb.

I was fairly darn glad with how it turned out, though it was certainly not speedy.

A little while later (we wrapped up up the backsplash and the counter in between these two doors) it was time to wrestle this puppy into place (the glass is not frosted, it is simply covered in protective plastic).

Since the door did not have any hinges, I’d have to route out spots for them on both the door and the jamb this time. And since it is a heavier door, I was adding three hinges. Instead of carefully clamping scrap wood each time around to guide my cut, I chose to make a template out of my practice board. Here is where I marked where I needed to cut (using my jigsaw).

Here is my wooden guide in action on the door, as I routed out the spot for the first hinge.

Once I had the three hinge mortises made on the door, I propped it up and loosely held the jamb pieces in place so I could mark the hinge placement on the side jamb piece. I also put some shims up top to ensure that I did not run into the same problem we had last time (having a tight fit up top).

With the hinges traced out on the jamb and my wooden template at hand, it was fairly swift work to route out the spots on the jamb.

I will fast forward a bit, since the process was the same from here the second time around – we nailed together the jamb pieces, brought them into the space, and then leveled, shimmed, and nailed everything in place. With Sherry’s assist I got the door hung much faster this second time around… and it worked strong! We were relieved. There were high fives and a fair amount of bad moon-walking.

Our dancing was cut short because this door still needed a knob. I picked up this $19 kit to assist drill the holes for the doorknob precisely. It was not the sturdiest thing in the world, but it was worth the money simply to have some instructions to follow – and the right size drill bits handy.

In short, it clips onto the door, using the strike plate as the guide for where it should go (of course, I had to add the strike plate first).

Then using one of two cross bore bits (depending on the one your knob requires) you drill a big honkin’ hole through the door, per the instructions.

Then you use the other bit to bore through where the latch will go.

If all goes well, you end up with something that looks like this.

The part it did not cover – and perhaps this is simply specific to the knobs we own – was routing out a spot on the end for the latch to recess into. I used my router freehand, so it did not come out perfectly but it does the trick simply fine (we can smooth things out with caulk or wood putty before we prime/paint).

The victory was that it was hung, it closed securely, it stayed open when you opened it (some doors that are not hung level slowly close themselves when open), and it looked fairly – even in its unpainted film-covered state.

Since the wood floor was a little short of extending all the way to the door, I nailed in a couple of extra hardwood pieces to create a little horizontal threshold. We in fact truly like how it looks, so we hope it works with whatever flooring we end up with in the storage room. I do wish I had extended the wood flooring simply an inch further into the laundry room so the tile did not peek through (d’oh) but I have been comforted by noting how many other thresholds/floor changes do not align perfectly with the doors that I never truly noticed before this project – so perhaps nobody else will notice either? Until I pointed it out on the internet.

We plan to paint it when we spray all of the molding, and obviously the casings and such will go in when we do the rest of the room. We also ordered two more door knobs with the decorative back plates that we need, so they’ll match the other rooms off of this hallway.

We did tons of laundry last week for the first time since the laundry room door went up and it was Excellent to be able to close the door. It truly does make the laundry substantially quieter. But what we are truly loving is not having to wrestle that plastic drop cloth every time we go into the storage room. Life is good when the drop cloths come down.

It is fairly exciting to stare down the barrel of close-to-done when it comes to this little addition of ours (if you can call the laundry room that, since it used to be unfinished space). On one hand it feels like it has taken us a while to get this far, and on the other hand it is fairly remarkable that this room was not even drywalled a month ago – especially since our first and second houses’ kitchen renovations took us over four months each (and those were already wrapped up rooms to start with). In the words of Dory: simply keep swimming.