Quote:
Originally Posted by Ahuch
Anyone have any solid advice on changing doors out? I'm on a mission to continue removing all the Oak in the house. The frames are all square and solid, my first thought is that I could just change the doors and not bother with pre-hung.
Doors themselves - I'd like to find something a little more solid as opposed to the typical hollow doors you find at Home Depot. Maybe Finger jointed wood instead of MDF/HDF?
I have a cheap-o Ryobi router, so I was thinking of buying one of those mortising templates for the hinges.
Anything else I should be aware of? It seems like painting the existing door frame might show the oak grain unless I use wood filler / sand which could be a nightmare in itself.
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I know that pain. I bought a house that had honey oak cabinets, doors, window frames, baseboard, floors, wainscoting etc. just honey oak everywhere. The only thing that survived as honey oak was the floor because I ran out of time and budget to sand it down and stain it.
For doors, how many are you doing and what do you have existing? You can't just paint over them and hope for the best. You have to strip them down by washing them with TPS/bleach and then sand them before priming and then painting... but also have space to keep the damn things and wait for them to dry at every step. You're better off purchasing something that is ready to be painted rather than refurb the old one IMO. We had a ton of issues with cabinet door repainting/refurb and many had to be re-done until we got the hang of things. I didn't even both attempting it with the doors.
Knowing what I know now, I should have just got new cabinets too instead of re-furbing them. Might be like 20-40% more, but better design, more modern, brand new and can more easily add things like anti-slam etc. Repainting/refreshing an old one isn't a joke if you have more than a handful to do.
I just contacted a client in a small town and did a batch order of 30 solid core doors that were ready to be painted. Not only is it upgraded being solid core, it also has an updated design as well. The client even said it's possible to have the hinges pre-installed for like $30-50 a door or something stupidly cheap and super worth it (I didn't go that route), but then you have to figure out the full pre-hung or partial pre-hung route.
The contractor I used said pre-hung wasn't necessary and basically just kept the old door close, matched up the old door to the new one to figure out the hinge positioning and then installed them rather than the above.
Please do not manually chisel. My contractor was getting pissy manually chiseling 30 doors, and about 10 doors in, I discovered this and asked if he knew of it:
https://www.homedepot.ca/product/ryo...ate/1000732628
https://www.homedepot.ca/product/ryo...9550?rrec=true
He had a good jig system for the hinge so he didn't need the above, but he didn't know about the door latch kit above and it saved him a crap ton of time on the remaining doors.
For the door frame, I had the contractor re-use the old trim and painted it. it seemed a little easier for what we were trying to accomplish, but it wasn't much less of a pain in the ass. For baseboard, we just went to Timbertown and got new stuff. If you get it on sale it's idiotic cheap and it's an updated design.
Painting wise, I paid for a higher end sprayer and let the contractor learn on the job. It was far cheaper than paying something insane like $100-140 an hour and the job the contractor did was more than adequate. It uses more paint but it looks far nicer. Sherwin Williams and some other places will offer you constant streams of 25-30% off your orders if you set up an account with them.