October 26, 2008
New Front Door
It has been a long time coming, mainly 'cause I was unsure of my ability to do it acceptably. Did the Patio Room and the back door of the garage and had to adjust the door after the fact to get it to close smoothly.
Wendy finally got tired of the waiting and went and purchased the doors, a new black steel security screen and a pre-hung fiberglass entry door. No place to store them other than my motorcycle parking space in the garage. Which left Thumper chained to a tree nighttimes, shivering in the cold.
Tore out the old doors, set the new entry door in the resulting gap. Shimmed, secured, adjusted, etc., finally got the door hung perfectly square -- opens and closes with light fingerpressure.
House is built with OLD 2x4's. New 2x4's are 1.5" x 3.5" -- mine are 1.75" x 3.75", making the walls a quarter inch thicker than new houses. Inside I do not have 1/2" or 5/8" drywall -- I have a 1/4" board with holes over which is about a half inch or so of plaster, with a finish coat over that; adding another 3/8" to 1/2" to the wall thickness. My stucco is between 3/4" and 1" thick. All told, the door, when mounted so that the inside of the frame was even with the wall, had the outside of the frame 1.25" in from the outside level of the stucco. So I was planning on building the frame outwards to match the thickness of the wall. until....
I noticed that the setback was exactly the same as the frame of the security screen. Hmmm.....
So instead of mounting the security screen on the outside, atop the moulding around the door, I have it mounted to the door frame with the moulding over it. Looks FABULOUS. Especially since, given the minor increase in costs, I went with solid OAK moulding -- only 5 each of the 7 foot long pieces. (oops, mitered the wrong angle, make that 6 pieces -- gots material for a really nice oak picture frame.) To finish it off, a good old fashioned shellaccing. (Is shellac still made from beetles? did you know you clean your brush in a water-ammonia mix -- wowser! definitely do that Outside!!)
Posted by Paladin at October 26, 2008 02:27 PM