If you have never worked with doors, you may have the assumption that you can remove a door and replace it with another door on a one-for-one basis or can easily execute Doorframe Realignment in Adelaide. After all, the door’s been hanging there for 10 long years. How difficult can it be to re-hang it?
What often happens is you spend incalculable hours trying to realign doors into doorframes. Sometimes, it is virtually impossible, as the doorframe gets out of the square when the foundation of the house subsides.
So, it is not at all your fault if the door does not align and fit well.
The problem may have already exacerbated before you began carrying out Doorframe Realignment in Adelaide. Previous owners might have gradually realigned the door to fit into that ever-changing doorframe. Bottoms might have shaved off, sides planed, hinges might have got tweaked. Eventually, you were left with a door that aligns and fits only that one, unique doorframe, just like a glove!
When the Door Does Not Fit the Door Frame carrying out Doorframe Realignment in Adelaide becomes a challenge:
One trick you can make use of when re-hanging your door is to reconfigure casing and trim around your door. Basically, your door remains as it is but everything around it is somewhat rebuilt to align and fit around that door. This isn’t a hack to solve all of your issues, but it will take care of any problems you might have with excessive gaps.
How is it done?
Aligning and fitting the door into the doorframe is a series of gentle tweaks, involving the adjusting of hinges, optionally replacing them with adjustable hinges, reinstalling trim, and reworking the casing.
For carrying out Doorframe Realignment in Adelaide, you will require:
Tools
- Electric nailer
- Hammer
- Finish nails
- Shims
Materials
- New door casing and trim
- Screws which are slightly longer than the current hinge screws
- Adjustable door hinges (this is optional)
Remove Trim
Knock off of the trim around your door, except for the hinge-side. In a lot of cases, it is possible to remove the trim without breaking it fully, while in other cases, you may need to break the trim. Medium density fiber-boars, or MDF, are especially prone to accidental breakage, thus, it is often more convenient to demolish it and buy new MDF trim.
The step of Hanging Doors while executing Doorframe Realignment in Adelaide
With those 3 sides of trim removed, hang the brand new door as you normally would hang it.
Assess Level and Swing
You want the door to be level and swing in a smooth fashion. Set a level on top of your door. Slowly swing your door open & closed, watching the bubble on the level. If it goes out of level, take note of where exactly this is happening and mark an arc on the floor with chalk or a removable painter’s tape. This is an important step when carrying out Doorframe Realignment in Adelaide.
Adjust Hinges
In many of the cases, you can easily correct level at the hinges, by either tightening or loosening the screws which hold the hinges to its very casing. Installing adjustable hinges gives you much more room to play with. These hinges can easily be adjusted up to ‘1/4’ inch vertically – a significant distance when it is about hinges. By adjusting one single hinge in one particular direction and the other one in a different direction, you will be able to make major changes in the level of the door and it will ease your Doorframe Realignment in Adelaide.
Even the normal, non-adjustable hinges can be slightly adjusted. One way to pull the hinges tighter in is to replace the existing screws with slightly longer screws.
If your door is scuffing at the opposite end of the doorframe, ram these in as tightly as possible. By contrast, you can also add a cardboard spacer cut to the exact size of the hinge mortise, if you have to close a slight gap at that opposite end.
The door should clear the finish flooring by close to 1/2 an inch. You should keep in mind that this is the finish flooring and not the substrate. So, if it is sub-floor at present and you hang the door with a 1/2 an inch clearance, it’ll drag once the finished flooring is installed.
Build Casing and Trim while carrying out Doorframe Realignment in Adelaide
Build casing which follows the configuration of your door. The inner door casing has the ability to be moved incrementally inward by adding wood shims. Tack into place by using an electric nailer rather than hand-nailing.
Once the casing is well in place, the trim follows the lines of that particular inner casing. With trim, you will especially want to make use of an electric nailer that drives thinner nails than the traditional finish nails. Paint trim & casing to complete the entire project of Doorframe Realignment in Adelaide.
As homes settle, doorframes can become skewed. It may not be much, but it can cause your door to rub or even bind on the doorframe when opening/closing the door. Other things that can cause a door to bind are a slight swelling of the door because of the humidity changes or doorframes that are loose behind the casing. Doorframe adjustment is done with wedges, characteristically by trial and error until and unless the door closes & opens smoothly. This kind of adjustment is also a conventional procedure when installing and carrying out Doorframe Realignment in Adelaide.
Make contact with our Handyman for realignments and Doorframe Repairs in Adelaide. We fix all kinds of doors such as federation entrance door, federation internal doors, Californian bungalow entrance doors, Victorian entrance door, federation style internal doors, leadlight entrance doors and the list is long. All you have to do is give us a call and we will take care of the rest.