doors.

I remember maybe grabbing this three years ago or so. We were on press check in Portland and stayed at the DeLuxe. I liked the very film noir motif. And the door hanger. So I yoinked it. The flip side says ‘Quiet on the set.’ I’ve been holding onto it since then until when I finally hung up my ‘real’ bedroom door. The previous one was a Home Depot thirty-dollar beauty hollow-core POC complete with classy faux gold door knob. Julian’s bedroom has the same one. He’ll have a new door in the next couple of days. There were six total interior doors to hang. I bought them all a long (long) time ago. No - long time ago. They’ve been stacked against each other down in my basement for a while. Four of them now are hung. Two more to go. It’s been a process.

Let’s see ... it started with priming. That was easy. I always use a roller to prime. Once it’s dry I sand it down with some 220 velcro’d to my orbital sander. Then paint for real. I’ve been using Olympic Super White semi-gloss on all the trim since I started painting this place. And I’m a firm believer in Flotrol - it works beautifully on semi-gloss (and would on gloss as well but I’ve never gone there) and makes a HUGE difference in the end result (as in - no brush streaks). Just saying.

This has been - umm - quite the learning process. The first two doors I painted before mortising and boring the holes for the latches and locks. Mistake #1. Paint after. There have been plenty more but I figured by the time I got to the last of the six doors I’d finally have a process that worked and would have learned how to hang a door properly. That’s how it usually works. Like Mom said a long time ago - ‘your first house is your practice house.’

I had to touch up the paint on those first two.

Mistake #2: assuming they just fit. Without even trying to put them in the door jambs. Yeah. They didn’t. By only about a quarter-inch but that was enough to halt the whole process until I could dump them all in the bed of my truck and haul them over to Katie’s parent’s place to gratefully borrow her dad’s jointer planer to whack off an eighth of an inch (a sixteenth off each side). Grateful cos I’m not sure what other tool I could have used that would have made a nice, clean cut (my table saw wouldn’t have cut it - and I’m not sure if the circ saw would have either).

But with them then more or less fitted to their respective jambs I was able to break out the belt sander I was given by the dude from whom I bought the table saw to shave off a bit here and a bit there where the jambs weren’t perfectly square. Once they were all more or less perfectly fitted, I went to start boring and mortising.

The first door I just used a chisel. Not perfect enough - don’t like doing things by hand. Well, not when woodworking - like to be precise. So I broke out the router. Much better. Still had to chisel the corners from the hinge mortises and such but the router did most of the work and did it really, really evenly.

While boring the holes through the stiles for the latches and locks - by the third door I realized it was easier to a) first drill a 1/8” pilot hole for the much larger 1” bit to follow and b) drill both horizontal 1” holes straight through the 1-3/8”-thick doors first ... then, once they were bored as deep as they need to be - going through the face of the stile with the 3/4” bit for the lock pull and door knob. On the second door - with only 3/8” to spare with a 7000RPM drill (or something like that) I got off track and almost ended up drilling up through the stile face. Not cool.

Then lots more little pilot hole drilling for the screws to hold on the door knob plates and hinges and latch plates and stuff. Brilliant.

So backing up - the process looked like this:

Drill pilot holes through the door stile.

Bore the 1” holes through the stiles, using the pilot holes to guide the much larger bit (since there is only 3/16” allowance from front to back without accidentally drilling through the face of the door.

Bore the 3/4” holes through the stile face for the latch and lock.

Trace the outline of the latch plate and then roughly route out the shape - taking care (since I’m doing this freehand without a template or jig) not to go outside the lines.

Using a 1” chisel - chisel out the corners and sides to make it perfectly square.

Install the latch plate to make sure everything fits.

Install the door knob, lock and doorknob plate.

Onto the hinges - kind of the same thing as for the latch plate ... trace the shape of the hinge, route out with care (after setting it to the correct depth since it’s different than for the latch plate) and then -

yep ... chisel it square.

Then install the hinge.

Once that’s all done - paint!

And that’s just the beginning ... then it’s time to hang it in the jamb. It’d be much easier to have prehung doors rather than fitting slabs to existing jambs, but I’m never one for doing things the easy way. That and prehung doors are much more expensive and all the jambs in my house were pretty darn square.







I’ll get to the installation in a bit ...