I can’t find a post about this, other than a brief mention elsewhere, but at one point I updated the back door with a modern lock and security film on its window. The frame, having degraded with time, was barely holding the door in place. I corrected the problem temporarily with hardware reinforcements. It worked for the foreseeable future.
Then I got COVID and Liz used my compromised mental state to convince me that the door itself needed replacing, after she tried and failed to strip it of paint for a fresh coat. An indifferent and barely conscious self agreed.
To be fair, the steel cladding on the bottom of the door had recently warped and was catching. The seal around the frame itself had long since cracked and fallen out. There was definite water intrusion damage, but with so many priorities on a house’s upkeep, the door had remained as deferred maintenance.
So when my bout of COVID finally broke, we acquired a replacement door. It remained in the garage for a week on sawhorses while Liz applied goofy bee-themed designs. I will note at this point that we bought a pre-hung door, not because the included hardware is ever top-notch, but because I had learned the hard way that doors and frames shrink and warp at the same rate, and it’s almost impossible to match up a new door with an old frame. It can be done, but it’s definitely worth the cost/time offset. This lesson was learned with the inner garage door. Frustrating times, those.
Of course, installing a pre-hung door necessitates the removal of the old frame. And I’m glad I went through this trouble, because what lay beneath would not have been seen otherwise.
When the former homeowners installed the deck, as with all things they did to this place, they took the quickest and cheapest route to address any hangups. In this instance, in order to support the door base, they attached a piece of particle board vertically against the house frame. This wood was neither rated for moisture exposure nor sufficient to close the gap against nature’s intrusion. The particle board only succeeded in holding moisture against the house, resulting in rot and carpenter ant damage. And to further exacerbate the issue, it also formed a trench on top of the old concrete patio into which yard waste had accumulated.
Fortunately, the house joists were insanely solid, despite the ant damage. I suspect they were hardwood, not the usual pine, so I left them as-is, but not before we added a spray sealant for good measure. Then I layered planks of pressure-treated boards to replace the particle board and support the frame, stacked in a tile formation to prevent water ingress, complete with outdoor caulking on the joints.
The door itself, complete with frame, fitted as good as could be expected with only a few angry bouts of profanity. And as per my usual creed for upgrades applied to fixes, the strike plate was replaced with a security version, using 3.5″ screws through the frame and into the joists, in addition to the hinges. And the lock was given a proper upgrade as well.
Full sealant applied to the frame, the last external door has finally been addressed.
–Simon