On Purim day, my kids announced to me that our front door was cracking. I took a look, and sure enough, the narrow edge of it where it locks was beginning to splinter. Since it’s the original door and this house was built 70 years ago, it’s had a good long life, and it can’t be expected to last forever, especially with all the coming and going it endures with our family. I mentioned it to my dh, but things were then busy with Pesach preparations and other things he had to take care of, and it wasn’t really urgent. So it wasn’t until three weeks ago when it got so bad that I couldn’t lock the door that I strongly urged him to take care of it.
Taking care of it meant replacing the door, no small quickie project, and one that he admitted he really didn’t want to do, the real reason he wasn’t getting around to it. So off we went to Home Depot to order a door and pay someone else to do it. Once there we learned that to replace our current door with the least expensive door and to have it installed would be around $400 – $500, and it would take another six weeks until they could do it. I really didn’t want a door that didn’t lock for another six weeks, and that seemed like way too much money just for a simple door. So back home we went, without ordering the door! Dh started reading about how to replace doors, and a couple of days later, brought home a brand new preframed door from a building supply place for 50% of Home Depot’s price, for the exact same door – just $80 including tax.
Buying it was the easy part. The big part of the project was putting it in. So a week and a half ago on Friday (Friday is his day off which isn’t the best day for big projects, but that’s when things happen around here), the kids pulled the frame of the old door off with a crowbar, and he spent the rest of the afternoon installing it. By the time Shabbos came in, I was relieved that we had a new door in place – sort of. Our door frame isn’t a standard size, and the standard size door is two inches shorter than our frame, which means he needed to build the frame down to properly fit the door we bought (the alternative was custom ordering a door to fit the space, which was much more expensive). So the door was in, but there was still a 2 inch gap at the top. Fortunately it wasn’t very cold and it wasn’t hot enough to have to worry about mosquitoes, but still, it’s not the kind of situation you want to have long term, you know?
But it stayed like that until the following Friday, and then he built the door frame down. Now there was no gap, and it looked a lot better, but it still didn’t look finished because he needed to insulate the door, paint the woodwork, and replace the molding on the inside of the door. Well, we’re getting close to having it done – it’s now well insulated, the molding is on, and all that’s left is to paint the frame. Oh, and I want him to put the little viewer thing and a mail slot, but that’s kind of extra.
One thing that’s nice about doing your own repairs, aside from the money you save (and that’s not unsubstantial – if it was the same cost he’d rather have someone else do it!), is that you can often do a better and more thorough job than those you would pay. My dh added in a security feature he read about to make it harder to break in, and the insulation he added should keep out cold air leaks in the winter. (Leaks around windows and doors let in a surprising amount of cold.)
To keep the costs down, he reused as much lumber from the original door frame as he could, turning it over so that the unused side was facing out. He also reused the original molding. It got a bit chipped in the process of removing it, but once it’s touched up, it will look fine. Using two strategies – ‘do instead of buy’, and ‘shop at home’ (ie, see what you already have that can be used before going to the store) have so far saved us around $400 on this one project alone, so I’d say his time was well spent!
Avivah
