Hello all. Now where were we? Oh right, we had replaced one door downstairs (plus two upstairs) and needed to do the rest. This is the next part of the story.
This is what we were replacing. They came with the house and were undoubtedly original. They were serviceable--meaning they opened, closed, and fit the jambs--but not very appealing. They had a plastic veneer over a stiff cardboard/pressed wood interior.
That's why we opted for these, solid pine doors from Home Depot. Amazingly these were lighter and easier to maneuver than the solid core doors we installed upstairs for the bathroom and bedrooms.
As always the first step was the measure and trim the doors to fit. Fortunately since these were now our fifth-eighth doors, we had a bit of a system. The prep work per door was somewhere between one and two hours.
One thing that slowed the process down was having to constantly shift clamps as we trimmed the long edges. We don't have a single clamp long enough to run along the height of the door (akin to the one that runs the width of the door in the picture above) and had to jerryrig something by clamping a piece of wood we used as a straight edge and against which we ran the circular saw.
And you can see how little, plus the width of the saw blade, we took of each side to make it fit.
When it came time to install them we improvised this method to get the height right. These are styrofoam sheets that came as packaging with some piece of furniture. We've found them to be, among other things, knee-savers when doing flooring. Then once the door is screwed into place you wiggle the stryofoam away.
Here's how the first door turned out...
And here's the entire downstairs (with two more doors on the other side of the hallway). We still have to clear coat finish them but like how they look.
Until next time.
