Door, Done

As promised, the door to my daughters room was hung today :

A surprisingly straightforward job, though it was easy to foresee pitfalls along the way. It is a big advantage to fit a standard sized door into a standard sized frame. Basically everything just fits. I had taken great care to ensure that the door lining was square and vertical, and this attention to detail paid off today. Nothing at all had to be trimmed from the door.

As before, Dad came and helped me and we fitted the hinges to the frame first. We then inserted the door in the "closed" position, using packing pieces to raise it up to clear the carpet, and transferred the hinge positions onto the door. We each cut a hinge housing out, taking care to make sure they were the same depth (as this will determine whether or not the door is upright or lop-sided), then fitted the door to the hinge. Perfect.

I spent a little extra on the hinges to get "loose pin", which means that the pin can be pulled out of the hinge to separate the two parts. This allowed the door to be removed, thus making the fitting of the handle mechanism much easier. Even this operation was much simpler than I expected. Instead of having to cut a rectangular slot for the mortice mechanism, I used a simple barrel mortice, which just required a 22mm hole made with a flat-bit in an electric drill. This fitted neatly between the two parts of the double mortice-and-tenon joint of the central stile of the door.

The only mess up I made was in fitting the latch plate, where I transferred the measurements onto the frame incorrectly and mounted it too far forward. It has now been moved back to it's proper location, but some fillets of timber will need to be glued, planed and sanded to cover the old position.

I seem to remember a colleague at work telling me that his Grandad boasted that he could hang a door in an hour. Well it took Dad and I the best part of 4 hours, so we have a bit of practicing to do !