Home Ownership And You!

polrbehr wrote: »

That spread is unreal! And you got it at a nice price. I got my place for a song too, but I basically bought a house that happened to be sitting on 1/3 acre. You bought some seriously nice property, and as they say, you can't renovate location, you got that in spades.

Now get back to work , when you finish I'll give ya directions to my yard.

Gee! Thanks!

Said the previous post was too long so here's the rest.

So, the door. I wanted it to sit flush in the trimmed hole like the old door and the new filler panel do. I wanted it to match the filler door too. But I also didn't want awkward looking hinges in there either nor a piano hinge at the back. So in steps Rockler Woodworking and I bought myself a couple of the heaviest "European" cabinet hinges they had and installed them.

The door, when opened, actually kicks out a bit and then down to clear the trim around the hole. I did have to sand down the one edge so it wouldn't get hung up on the frame as it kicked down. Also, because of the initial motion, I had to clearance the inside of the leading edge of the door to clear the false panel and latch catch. But, when the door closes, the hinges actually draw it tight against the frame. I'm still going to seal it with foam tape but it worked out swimmingly!



I filled gaps everywhere with expanding foam to insulate it. Now, doesn't seem like much but the first winter we moved in, the house was perpetually cold. Like really cold. Like the heater's set at 72 and it's still 63 degrees in the living room and the basement is in the 30's. There's way more to this but I'll get to that later. All you need to know is that despite how shoddily I fit everything, just the fact that the new attic door closed up correctly and had a 1/16th inch gap around 1/3rd of it vs the 5/8ths inch gap around all of it cut over $450 off the heating bill last year for the season. Our average heating bill the first year was $380. That's **** insane. The average bill after I got this hole buttoned up? $210.

However, the first time I got this done, nothing was right because I stupidly believed that the ceiling was straight. The ceiling actually is straight. Whatever jackass that hung the sheetrock over the plaster, they didn't do that part straight. So the back of the hole sits about 1/2 of an inch higher than the front. Peachy.

Also, when I pulled the old ladder down, I found that whomever poorly coped the old quarter round at the top of the wall/ceiling joint frickin' glued it in with Liquid Nails and that came down along with some sheet rock, wallpaper and caulking. So I had to replace/repair that stuff too.

Anyway, here's what it looked like when I first got done with it.



But, at this point, I was out of time and money and we had the pool problem happen as well as a heater failure that cost me like $1200. I also had a hot water heater replaced for another $2300 so...yeah. More stories for later.

Fast forward a year to now and I get back to it.

What I ended up having to do was get the door clearanced for rotation right. All the trim I put up around the hole I had to take back down and resecure with some shims to get it level to level, not to the ceiling. Because the frame it was all mounted to was leveled to level. Subsequently, the rear of the hole hangs down 1/2 an inch more than the front, like I said. So rather than rip down the ceiling and fix the whole room, I nailed the trim back up with the shims and filled the gap with expanding foam. When it was done expanding, I trimmed it back and then I caulked all around it and filled the nail holes.

I also took the door down and clearanced it then adjusted hinges so they were even and securing the door shut properly.








The gaps at the joints at the corner are there because they were cut to the uneven hole, not the properly fixed hole. So I just filled them with the non-contracting painter's caulk because they were getting painted anyway and nobody is going to see it. I also caulked around the trim where it met the ceiling to hide the expanding foam and any other wonkiness on the trim to ceiling joint.

Also, you can see how the door was sitting crooked in that one picture. I got that as straight as I could which you'll see in later pictures. So after that, I sanded and tack-clothed the whole thing. Then I coped and installed new 3/4" quarter round trim.

I primed all of it...about 3 coats of primer. Then I painted it with the same paint I used for the white trim everywhere else. Two coats of that.





Then I went and got the leftover color paint from when I originally painted the rooms 3 years ago now and shook the hell out of it hoping I wouldn't need to buy new paint. The quarter round got painted with the same paint as the ceiling because that's what the rest of the trim on the ceiling is done with. Then I went and fixed the paint on the walls edging the quarter round. I also fixed some nicks in the walls from dumb kid stuff and some damage I did when I pulled the old attic ladder down.

This is the finished result.



It was a ton of work and getting the old ladder out without destroying the ceiling was hard. I had a friend and Jackie on a platform waiting to catch the ladder as I kicked the frame out of place. I still ended up crewing up a bunch of plaster along the edge, necessitating the the baseboard as trim approach because of how poorly the previous ladder was installed. But, I was able to retain the size of the opening for access while reducing the footprint in her room so she could use more of her space. I also sealed up a major HVAC loss point and cut down on the number of bugs that tend to creep into the house through such large gaps.

Everybody who walks in to the kids rooms asks me who I got to do the work. They think I'm lying when I say I did. I have had contractors over to do some work that is just too much for me to do myself and they ask who did the work too. When I tell them I did, they ask if I want a job. But this stuff is tedious and hard when things are done right. When you have to fix someone else's screw up WHILE trying to get something done right, it's exponentially more difficult.

This was all especially more difficult with this virus baloney going on as stores close early so even though I wanted to keep working on it after, like, dinner or something, I couldn't if I needed something because stores that were open until 9 or 10 pm were closed 3-4 hours earlier.

Sooooo...just spent 4 days huffing paint.

I don't have before pictures. Well, I do, I just haven't dug them up yet. They are on an external drive somewhere and I haven't dug it up yet.

Anyhoo. There's stories here. A few of them, short though, thankfully.

So 2nd floor of the house, I have 5 doors plus two bi-folds. The bi-folds are in the master bedroom, one is for a walk-in closet (has another story all it's own) and the other is for the small-ish bathroom. Yes, some jackwagon put bi-folds on a bathroom. I'm replacing them with solid doors to match the other doors upstairs but I have to remove the bi-folds and cut new hinge pockets and latch pockets on the frames then measure, trim and cut hinge pockets, door knob and latch holes. Then test fit the doors. Then I get to paint them. Then I get to hang them. So those two I didn't get to, they will likely be their own 3-4 day weekend all by themselves.

The doors on all these rooms? Only one door shut right and it was cut way too short. I'm not even sure why. But that door had another chunk of door grafted on to the bottom and then riveted in place. Not only was that done but the fake grain pattern wasn't even lined up. They were all the cheapest MDF doors one could find at Lowe's so this was easily Captain Halfassery, especially since a couple frames had severe issues and they went unaddressed with new doors cut crooked to fit the screwed up frames.

So, I was going to get new doors and reframe the holes myself. I asked my dad for his help and he was just bitching about how much work it was. Like I asked him to do it for me or something. All I wanted was experienced hands that I didn't have to tell what to do all the time. 'Cause anyone who has to tackle a huge project and have to do huge project 101 for the help knows how frustrating and slow things go when your help is not only uninterested but comes up with "great ideas" all the time to take short cuts and they get mad at you when you look at them incredulously like "Why would you even think that? Can't you see what's going on here?" Then they demand to get taken seriously when they clearly lack the experience to see just how short-sighted their "great ideas" are. Then you get to spend 20 minutes arguing about it while you have to explain to them why their great idea is a bad idea. Then you're just an arsehole know-it-all and they're butthurt.

My dad decided he was going to get the doors installed by someone himself. Fine, whatever. They're pre-hung anyway. Big whoop. But when we pulled the old doors, we found that some doors were missing header plates, thankfully not on load bearing walls but at least now I know why a couple doors have cracks in the wallboard over them and they like to vibrate.

So the doors got installed, took a couple days due to the problems we ran in to with insufficient framing and stuff I had to do to get doorways square or the pre-hung doors would get drawn out of alignment when secured in the doorways. But, I didn't have hardware when the doors were installed because the decision maker didn't like any of my ideas but didn't have any of her own. Finally decided on oil-rubbed bronze and white porcelain to go with what would be traditional but fancy for a house from the early 20th century.

After the doors were installed, though, it took almost 2 weeks to get the hardware in and that was her first lesson in lead times because I could have easily had the hardware when the doors were installed but we took over 2 months to reach a decision. So I held doors shut with masking tape and door stops until the door knobs showed up. The matching hinges didn't come in until almost 2 months later than the door knobs. Thankfully, the doors had hinges since they were pre-hung. It was fun.

The door knob hardware finally came in and in early December I installed it all. Was supposed to arrive for Thanksgiving weekend but delays in shipping due to diseases in the Asia made them late (same for the hinges, especially since production got delayed because the factory was shut down). They showed up the Monday after Thanksgiving. After I installed the door knobs, I found that a couple doors were not exactly latching right. This wasn't noticeable before the hardware was in place because there was nothing keeping the doors latched in place. They were tight and wanted to spring open. So I decided to check some things out and started removing one hinge, testing closure and so on until I found the problems.

A couple doors are not hung straight. The framed holes are plumb and square but the doors are cocked in the holes. One door is racked from side to side, the other is racked front to back. The 2nd door, it's hard to show pictures of. The first door is this one.



You'll have to zoom in but you can see that the gap on the right narrows at the top and widens at the bottom on the right side and opposite on the left. The door likes to spring open because the gap is so narrow that the it's actually hitting the jamb on the bottom left. Additionally, the latch was barely catching because of the gap difference.



Sorry for the other doors being in the way but you can see the gap being very tight at the bottom left.

The problem? The hinge pocket on the jamb is cut too deep. Since it was done at the factory, this is on the door company. I thought that the door was hung crooked but it's not. Plumb, square, couldn't get it straighter if I tried. The real problem is that typically, to fix this, you do what's called a "dutchman" where you score and chisel out a larger section of the door jamb where the hinge pocket is that's deeper than the hinge pocket, effectively removing the hinge pocket. Then you glue and nail in a new piece of wood and cut a new hinge pocket in place. This is not an insignificant amount of work. Especially since the hole depth is less than 1/16th of an inch deeper than the other two pockets. But that small bit, when stretched over the height of the door, translates into a 1/4 inch gap difference from top to bottom. So it's not good. Especially since the doors are MDF. The excess tension will eventually cause the MDF layers to separate and the hinge to extract itself from the door catastrophically.

Needless to say, I experimented with some door shims to see. As you can see in this picture, the shims are behind the hinge plate and that has solved the alignment issue.



Now I'm trying to decide on if I should just cut a shim for it and leave it that way or if I should dutchman this and do all that work. Thankfully, I did some tests with a solid piece of 2x4 and that fancy pants Delta miter saw I got. It is entirely capable of cutting a sliver of 2x4 off that is less than a sixteenth of an inch.

Before anyone says anything as well, I did make sure all the hinges were mounted the same way and if you put the barrel end plate on the opposite side of the other two hinges orientations, it can cause this kind of issue. Typically, though, you end up with a door that likes to close itself partially due to such shenanigans. But when tolerances are this tight, it can also cause the door to impact the door jamb and want to spring back open.