Another door installed!

I was able to replace the second of the two doors in my farmhouse basement this past weekend.  The rough opening in the concrete block wall was even smaller than the one I replaced last week!  UGH!  What this means is that I had to plane down the boards I used to replace the frame around the rough opening.   The boards I had for this job were 3/4" thick and needed to be planed down at least an eighth of an inch so that the pre-hung door frame would fit in the final framed opening.  So, Friday evening I made it to the farm and started planing these boards, even before I had the existing door and frame removed.  I prepped the framing boards as soon as I could because they needed to be cut to fit and painted and the paint dried before I could build the new frame from them!

This is the second of the two doors i replaced in my frame house basement.  This one leads up some stairs to a "bilco" basement entrance.  This wooden door (with no sill)  just isn't stopping critters from getting in the house.

Anyway, I finally got inside and stripped out the old door and frame:

The door and frame are removed and the rough opening cleaned up a bit.

I needed to measure the wood for the frame, cut and paint it before I went to bed!  Here is the painted door rough opening and the new frame installed (I did't paint around the door frame as far as I did last weekend).

The pre-hung door is on the floor, ready to lift into position.

The pre-hung door was still very tight fit!  Also, in this doorway, the opening was not perfectly square - I needed some room to shim!  I did my best - I shimmed underneath the sill to bring it to level, then I shimmed the hinge side of the pre-hung door frame to bring it to plumb.  After the hinge side was plumb, drove screws through the pre-hung frame into the rough opening frame.  Unfortunate, I jumped the gun on leveling/plumbing the rest of the door...  I checked for plumb on the latch side of the frame and found it was considerably out of square AND that the door was not able to close!  I could not figure out how this was possible - I went back to the hinge side and rechecked for plumb - it was!  After some fiddling around, I found a couple of issues.  First issue:  I had not fully attached the hinge side to the frame and there was a bow in the frame!  Second issue: The screws that I had used to secure the pre-hung frame to the rough frame were too long and, in fact, they were pushing through the rough frame into the concrete wall behind - causing the frame to be out of square!  After I fixed these two issues things improved, but were still not perfect.  Unfortunately, at this point, I was too far committed to getting the door in fast.  The silicone caulking was already starting to cure and ripping everything out would have pretty much meant putting this whole install off by another week.  I finished the install and was glad to find that the door was still able to open and close,  Whew!

Door is in - no door knob yet in this picture.

Doorknob is on, door opens and closes!

I still need to paint both of the doors now that they are installed.  I did pick up some black spray paint that says it works on wood and metal.  The painting need to be done when things are warmer and drier.