Doors
Our Beautiful Doors
May/15/08 08:56 AM
Our interior doors have arrived! Call me biased but they are quite possibly the most beautiful doors I have ever seen, and they don’t even have a finish on them. Yet. They are shaker style, craftsman doors in Alder (which I now know to be called “poor man’s cherry”).
Travis at Mid America Hardwoods has taken great care of us. Excellent customer service, and has done a good job on getting us some deals. I used the door order to leverage a better price on the hardwood flooring that they manufacture. He got us beautiful 4” wide, 3/4” solid oak, pre-finished plank down to $2.99 a sqft This brings our hardwood flooring to about $5.00 a sqft installed. Not too shabby... That means our floors will run about $6,000, and considering our last quote was $15,000, we are pretty darn excited.
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Diy Pocket Doors
Apr/02/08 08:30 AM
I picked up this pocket door frame at Lowe’s for around $50, which seemed pretty reasonable to me since I have never purchased or installed one before.
This Sunday’s project was to install 3 pocket door frames, simple right? Well, first of all I read through the instructions and I’m not sure if I read the english version or the greek version, because I didn’t understand a word of it. All I know is that there were fractions involved.
Plan B: I went to the manufacturer’s website and I downloaded an installation video. It was pure gold. I musta watched the video at least 20 times that morning, in fact I was a borderline expert at how to install the buggers. One thing in the video that really stood out was, “The average installation time for this project is 10 minutes.” This gave me a huge dose of needed confidence.
I began the project and the first hang up I had was the rough openings weren’t what they needed to be. Who would have thought that I should have looked at the rough opening sizes for the pocket doors before I had them framed up. Luckily, the framed openings were a little too big and and the height was a little too short. No biggie, I could just trim off the door height by 3/4”. The frame for all three doors was exactly 1” too wide. Simple fix, right? I just sister a board in to bring it up to the correct size. Only problem is that it requires 1” thick lumber.
Now of all the mysteries of the universe that exist, the most mystifying is the nature of lumber sizing. If you go to the lumber store and buy 1” lumber, it is not 1”. Nope, it is 3/4”. Therefore I would need to buy 5/4” lumber to get the correct thickness, because for some stupefying reason five quarter inches equals one inch. That being said, I challenge you to find 5/4” lumber on a Sunday morning. It is next to impossible. Luckily, I remembered that treated decking planks come in 5/4”, which seems almost as stupefying as the enigma of lumber sizing. So I went to Lowe’s and bought them, I then had to cut them down to the correct width. You know, the width of a 2”x4” which, in fact, is actually 3 1/2”.
Anyway, I got the doors framed in to the correct size. After that I began installing the door. I cut down the headers to the correct size, and this was pretty easy. They have the standard door sizes pre-marked on the headers which really simplifies the sizing and cutting. The installation video said that it only required one person to install the door. Well, I’ve never seen a person with 4 arms nor did I have an extra set I could borrow, so I got my wife to help me hold up the header while I nailed it into place.
After it was all said and done it had taken, NOT the prescribed 10 minutes to install the door. I had taken 6... Hours that is. In all honesty the other 2 doors went pretty quickly, taking about 30 minutes each.