smacky and bucky

When we bought our current house (four years ago?) There was a building behind and to the left of it, a combination one-bay garage and workshop area. The workshop area had a particleboard door that was falling to pieces at the bottom.

Well, the building is still there, and the door has rotted even more, and L bugged me about it enough times (and she's pregnant now) so I decided to finally do something about it. The first thing to do was take measurements. This door was made of stuff that was easy to cut, so there was no way I was going to find something even close to the same size: 39" x 83". Wow. Okay. I also needed a board to brace the bottom of the frame on one side (it had also rotted to pieces). Thus the 1" x 4" x 59" board drawing at the bottom.

Measurements in hand, I headed to Home Depot. Thank goodness they still make cuts for you for free! It saved me a LOT of time and headaches. I browsed the flat sheets of wood, finally finding one that was about an inch thick, nice and flat, about two grades below cabinet grade wood (and thus only about $14 compared to $35). I didn't mind if it had knots and such, as I was planning on covering it.

Remember wood paneling? Thin stuff, found in every basement and rec room in the 1970s. It's still around, but there are more options now. I selected white beadboard. I had the patient employee cut both the sheet of wood and the paneling to the same dimensions (39" x 83"). I had the wife's hatchback, so I tied the sheets of cut wood to the top of the car and drove home without incident.

I removed the old door and fixed the door frame. Fixing the frame was kind of a bitch and I smashed my thumb twice with a hammer nailing it into place.

Next I put a cloth tarp on the floor and laid the sheet of wood down with the paneling on top of it. They lined up perfectly. Yay, Home Depot wood cutting guy! This was the exciting part, because I got to use a new toy: The Stanley TRE550 Electric Staple/Brad Nail Gun! Only 2.5 stars on Amazon? Weird. Brad nails are small nails (these were 1/2-inch long) with no head, so they go flush into the wood so you can't see them. I had bought the tool to staple new insulation in the attic (remember that project? Yeah, currently on hold). The problem was Target (where I bought the thing for $25, cheaper than Amazon!) only carried the staples. Home Depot doesn't sell Stanley nail guns, so they didn't carry the nails either. I ended up having to order them from a 3rd-party seller on Amazon, which was annoying because the shipping was more than the twice the cost of the nails (which were only $2). But they arrived in two days, so they were waiting for me when I got home yesterday.

Once I figured out how to load it, the nail gun was AWESOME. The secret was to push down lightly on the top before pulling the trigger. Imagine you're going to staple a big stack of paper and you get the idea. The nails went in flush (or just above flush) as fast as I could move the gun over. In no time I had nailed the paneling to the board all the way around. I went back over it with a small tack hammer (not sure why I own it but glad I had it) and popped the few above down flush. The old door had a metal brace on the long sides, and it was still in good condition, so I removed it from the old door and put it on the new one, using new 1/2-inch screws.

The final steps will be (1) get the door screwed into the hinge brace. I didn't want to remove the hinge brace from the frame and risk not being able to line up the holes in the frame or not being able to tighten the screws back into the frame sufficiently, so I'm going to do it a bit backwards: I'm going to use wood shims to lift the bottom of the door enough that it was swing freely when they are removed, and I'll set a balance on top of the door to make sure it's level before I attach the door to the hinge brace with alternating screws on both sides of the door. And then (2) I will remove the padlock bracket from the old door, close the new door, mark where the padlock bracket will go, drill the four holes for it, and attach the bracket.

Swing back to the top and look at the old door, then look at my new door below:

Pretty nice, huh? Two random things in the pic above: The "Impeach them both" sign was put in our front yard without our permission about two years ago, as Bush's second term was winding down. I removed it that day and put it in the garage. You never know when you'll want to call for the impeachment of two people, and I want to be ready! County school board, you'd better not piss me off! The framed diplomas on the wall are my grandfather's. He was a mortician and had four or five diplomas from mortuary schools. They were in a stack in my grandmother's attic after she died and we were cleaning out the house. I couldn't throw them away, but I also couldn't hang them in my two-bedroom house like a giant shrine. So my solution was to hang them in the workshop side of the garage. It's dry in there, and not too humid, so they're fine there.

I'll post a final pic when I'm all done. I'm proud of it so far. The planning and execution have gone well. Editors can be handy in other ways too!