Update on the door installs

I had a family reunion Saturday (Dad's side), so I wasn't able to get a lot of "farm work" done this weekend.  I am so glad I went though, the reunion was fun as usual!

Anyway, I did take some pictures to update the log of the door installs:

The shop door!  OMG, this one was a mess!  

The rough opening is small, but to make up for that it is not square or plumb! YAY!

Took me almost a whole day to get the door in, shimmed and plumb.  But here it is!

This is all caulked and painted now.

Inside view.  Slightly ajar.

Same view, but closed.  No visible light around the door!  Unlike the old door.

Door stairs outside door all painted and caulked in.

The door under the porch (aka, the root-cellar).  I painted it black.  I don't know why.

I had to paint all of these doors in cooler temperatures than I should have.  Hence the patchiness of the coating.  I really should put a second coat on them - maybe this summer.

Working on painting the cellar now.  Almost done.

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.

Replacing an old basement door

I finally got back up to the farm this weekend!  Spent about 2 hours digging out the driveway with my frontloader.  Frontloaders really aren't great at moving snow.  Here is the result:

Once I got in, I got right to work on the door issue.   Here is the old door to a room under my front porch:

Kind of rough shape!  Since I want to use that room for a root cellar, I need to take care of this door!  So I bought some pre-hung exterior doors to replace the various doors in this house (and one for the old garage).  The problem is that the pre-hung doors assume that you have a certain size rough in size opening!  So I removed the 2x6's that were framing the rough opening in the concrete wall and replaced them with 1x6's.  BUT, even then, I found that the pre-hung unit just barely fit - but with no room for shims!  The impact, of course, is that I would not be able to adjust for fit if there were any issues with squareness or plumb.  

I got super lucky though and was able to fit the door in place without the need for the shims - it fit fairly well and the door opens and closes just fine! Whew!

Here is the end result:

I made a couple of movies too, however I had no tripod so the quality is not great.  Enjoy!

Before: 

After: