The Bower Family Happenings: Knock Knock...Who's There?

One of our projects this weekend was to remove our icky-ghetto-crap-nasty front door. I've been yearning to replace it since we first looked at the house, before even buying it. Replacing a door seemed really intimidating at first--I didn't know how it was attached to the frame, nor did I understand what the frame was composed of. But while we were doing the flooring project, we exposed the frame when we removed all the icky casing around to replace it with pretty little rossettes and fancier casing. Once you can see what the frame looks like it isn't all that complicated.

Here are pictures as proof of the extreme nastiness of our original door:

We went to Home Depot on Sunday and picked out a nice door with a pretty window in it. My dad assured me that replacing a door and frame is "just as easy as making a huge wedding cake," meaning that in practice you just follow the basic directions: get all the ingredients, follow the recipe, put the biggest layer on the bottom, and the smallest on top. Doors from Home Depot do come with directions, much like a recipe. But like making a huge wedding cake, there are a lot of things that can go wrong. (I tried to make a wedding-type cake once, just for fun, and it was very difficult to man-handle the heavy pieces of cake into a respectable--and level--arrangement.)

Once we removed the old door (finally!), Dave gave me the go-ahead nod to start whacking away with my hammer and prying to my heart's content to remove the old frame. Boy, was that satisfying. There was 50 years of paint on there, plus all the dings and gouges that paint was trying to hide. We saw two colors of green (teal and olive...gross), white, and the graham cracker brown it is now. This house, as in other rental units we've lived in, has thick layers of paint peeling off of the door hinges in every room. Why why why do people simply paint over their hinges?! Ew, it is just so gross, trashy, and ugly. It is also an inconvenience to folks like me who try to remove said nasty hinges. In this case it wasn't so bad because I just tore off the frames to which they were attached. Normally, however, you have to dig through the paint with the tip of your screwdriver just so you can get to the darn screw grooves.

Everything was going fine as we dutifully followed the installation directions: we set the new door-plus-frame unit temporarily into the opening to make sure it would actually fit. (On a house this old you can't be sure everything is level and/or square.) It did, so we moved on by removing it and running lines of caulking on the underside of the new threshold, which Dave had already improved by adding a piece of redwood for stability. We placed the door back into the opening and then shimmed it in the correct places, in the correct order, as indicated by the directions. We checked and double-checked that everything was level and square after each shim was added. You'd think that'd mean our door was perfectly installed, right? Well, you'd be dead wrong.

After all the shims were placed and we had screwed most of the shim-spots, Dave decided to try opening the door, just to triple-check that everything was working right. You can tell from the look on his face that it wasn't working right (see next picture, below). He couldn't get the door open! He finally pulled it open only to discover that it wouldn't close again. The stinkin' frame wasn't square! Mind you, this is the frame that came with the door...it came around the door.

At this point we weren't sure what to do. It was visually obvious that the framing on the knob-side was not straight--it was bowed out like a cowboy's legs. We fiddled around with it by pushing it in towards the house, mimicking what would happen if we were to screw it down tight against the house framing. That seemed to do the trick, except at the top. We thought about returning the defective door, but frankly, it was 5pm on Sunday and we were just plain lazy. We'd already made a bunch of holes in it and had covered the bottom with caulking. It would be such a pain to explain this huge mess to the clueless Home Depot return clerk. We decided to try screwing it on really tightly against the house framing--failing that solution we'd just cut that part of the frame away from the rest of the frame.

Luck was on our side...it worked! We finally have a functioning and pretty door on our little house. On Monday we went back to Home Depot to buy solid wood exterior door casing and a bunch of annuals and shrubs for the front of the house. He busied himself on Monday afternoon with the casing, which oh-so-conveniently matches the indoor stuff, while I planted some more of the dirt patch my daddy and I created on Easter weekend.

Here's our pretty new door and casing, less a coat of primer and paint. Doesn't Dave do such a good job? His dedication to doing a good job never ceases to amaze me: