I always like to open a good door. It brings new opportunity, new stories, and new friends. This story starts with removing 31 Dark Mahogany Slab doors and replacing them with new white panel doors, some hollow core, solid core, 4 bifolds, and 2 French doors. Thank you to my sister in law for the opportunity to work on this project in their new home.
The project starts on a Friday night with building a mortising jig for the hinges. I chose to make it out of laminated Mdf to fit the router jig that I have which will make easy work of mortising the hinges. It was a nice night outside, in early September so I thought I would take advantage of it by using some outside lights rather than getting the dust all over the garage. First comes the lamination, and then, I dado out the appropriate sized jig slot on the table saw.
Once that is complete we move to dadoing out a slot for the fence that fits in the face of the jig and laminate the fence in place. Then its time to wait until the morning.
The laminated jig needs to dry under pressure of the clamps holding it down overnight.
Here is a picture of my outside workshop at night with a halogen light on my ladder. It was a beautiful night 25 degrees and dry for making great jigs.
I drove to Peterborough to pickup a Titan Capspray 95 which will be a great addition to the tool collection, and will lay down a nice finish on the doors, without brush or roller marks. The Titan HVLP sprayer is used for cabinetry style doors, as it atomizes non thinned paint nicely and I have 2 different projector sets to complete different density and volumes of spraying.
Here are a few pictures of the new jig, which I then coated quickly with some urethane finish to allow the router to slide over it smoothly.
Before painting the doors I setup 128 wooden blocks with screws to attach to the bottom and tops of the doors. With 30 doors one tends to run out of space while they are drying so this will allow me to stack the doors on top of each other.
Here goes on the first coats of paint on some of the new Premdor panel doors. Not a bad result and no brush marks on the doors.
They look alright in place.
The locksets all have to be cut in place on the doors as well as hinging them. They have chosen some nicely styled locksets.
The French doors all had to be taped and papered prior to spraying. With an old door being reused its important to use a really good quality of primer that will stick to the previous oil based finish that was once on the doors. There are a few minor dents in the old door, but these will mostly be covered in once we lay down 4 coats of good acrylic white on top of it. Here are the first coats on the French doors.
The method of spraying them is particular as you don't want paint buildup and runs in the corners. Start off the edge of the exterior of the door and run all the way across the door for consistent spraying. Or use the trigger on the gun very softly to slowly add volume as you are coming near the section that requires additional paint. Its important to always overlap on a wet edge to prevent too many "flash lines".
Here is a picture of actually spraying the medium chosen.
The Stiles and Rails on the edge of the door all get done last. Its easiest to ensure consistency without starting and stopping in the middle of those long sections at the last coat, prior to the drying stage.
Here are a few shots of what the door looked like before.
Some use on the kick bottom stile of this door. Not to worry it will mostly get filled in with the exception of some of the larger dents.
And here is what the solid core doors look like after a proper second coat of sprayed acrylic.
A great consistency on the sheen without "flash" differential marks. Proper overlap techniques are used.
This particular French door got 4 coats of paint to properly smooth it down with sanding in between for adherence.
Not a bad result on this the 2nd coat.
This Titan capspray 95 is worth its weight in gold. And buying it used saved me 50% on the cost of the turbine and the spraycap.
Here is the typical result after the first coat is applied. With the wooden blocks on the door, it is then important to flip the door over and do both sides. Sometimes its hard to remember if the backside is done when you have 3 doors lined up. So a few times I had to bring some doors back for the finish on the reverse sides as it was missed in 31 spray sessions.
As these doors are being retrofit into a 30 year old house, the jambs are not exactly plumb. In addition the house had experienced an hardwood floor renovation without moving the jambs higher in the door frames. Hence there is a fair amount of trimming the sides, then bottom of the door to get them to fit well in the frame. After that 3 of the doors also required an angular cut on top of the door as the frames were out of square on the top. This allows the door to look square in the jamb, even though the jamb is out of plumb and square. 75% of the doors required trimming after the hinge mortising was completed. Its a bit of an art to fit doors, as they should be wedge placed and marked in the physical jamb to trim them exactly to the shape of the non plumb jamb. This sometimes meant moving the doors in and out of the house up to three times.
Here you can see the locksets being installed. I like to set the lockset after the door is fully installed on a retrofit using a lockset drilling jig from mastercraft. This ensures that the lockset is identically aligned with the existing set hole in the jamb. With out of plumb doors being retrofit there is no reasonable way to predrill the doors before they are hung, as you take great risk that you missed the lockset on the opposing jamb completely. This would cause a second lockset hole to be cut in the jamb which is not ideal.
On the solid core doors it is best to use a lengthy construction screw in the inside of the hinge plate. I used 2 1/2" screws to attach the door straight to the wall stud in behind the jamb. This ensures that the 3/4" screws don't wiggle loose if the door gets some heavy use from children (or adults). You can see the gold construction screw in the center one. One is used on the top hinge and one on the bottom.
The closets in this house previously had louvered doors, and so it was necessary to mortise the hinge on the jamb onsite. I left the jamb in the door frames and cut the hinge plate in with a router on the side of the jamb. I made a second jamb jig that I attached with two way tape for the temporary mortising.
Then we needed to remove the top louver guide trim as well and install doorstop behind the door. Once the door is set in place we can also install the door catches at the top of the closet doors as pictured here. Those small screws in these catches are difficult to hang onto and typically fall on the floor about 4 times for each screw before you get it in the door stop and on the door. I like to screw it on the door first and then go in the closet to screw the catch on the doorstop while its attached to the door. This allows for precise spacing.
Then we add the closet dumb handles.
Here is what the double closet doors look like afterwards.
These double closet doors needed to be trimmed in the middle as the frame was too tight, due to being framed for louvered doors previously. The bottoms also needed to be cut because of the retrofit hardwood flooring in the house. I removed 1/2 and inch off the bottom of the doors, and 3/4" off the bottom of the bathroom doors where the tile sat proud of the hardwood flooring.
These doors gave the bedrooms a much more modern look than the previous dark Mahongany slab doors did. It no longer looked seventies.
This particular door need to be trimmed on three sides, for width, height, and a crooked header jamb. but when it was placed in finally it fit perfectly.
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