Front Door Trim #1: A door well hung

On the left, how it looked when we moved in, on the right, how it looks as of right now.

The ugly “security” door on the front has always bothered me. It’s indicative of a bad neighborhood, where people don’t trust their neighbors, and we were very sure that it was an over-reaction by a person growing old and settling into their fears, otherwise we wouldn’t have bought the place. Thus it’s been important to me that we replace it fairly quickly.

We’d gotten a fir replacement front door door for $10 from one of the local building materials recycling places, sanded most of the stain off of it, were ready to hit it with the chemicals to do the final stripping and refinish it, when this gorgeous mahogany door came up on Craigslist. It was a bit more than we wanted to pay right now, but it was close enough to the door we wanted eventually, and the price was good enough, that we leaped on it. I’ve put a single coat of Penofin for hardwood on it, it’ll get another coat in mid-May, but it’s been sitting in the back waiting for the right time.

On Saturday I dragged the door around front to see how it’d fit, pulled the old door off, and started with the “if I do this, how does it work”, and eventually ended up with the door on hinges, lacking only a little door frame planing to make the whole thing fit. So I took a 1/16th off the top of the frame and installed the locks.

Now we need to tackle the trim. We either need to move in the existing white trim, because of the gaps where the security door frame used to lie, or install new trim. I just got a bunch of “Brazilian Redwood” which would probably be a little redder than the mahogany of the door, but not too much, so I just used a sample of the door mahogany. We’re going to replace those rails on either side of the front stoop, so I whipped up some visualizations of what it might look like:

The door as it is now, with no trim
With a double curve, wide at the top, narrow at the bottom
With a single curve, narrow at top and bottom
Straight

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-- Dan Lyke, Petaluma California, http://www.flutterby.net/