Complete Guide On Installing a Blank/ Slab Door From Scratch!

all right so to get us started I usually like to put the new door right in the hole where the old door came out of okay now you're going to want probably about a sixteenth of an inch over here on your hinge side and a probably good eighth of an inch over here on the other side across the top you're probably going to want another eighth of an inch or so the bottom isn't as critical depending on what kind of flooring you have if you've got hardwood floor if you've got carpet you don't want to drag it across the carpet real bad you know but it needs to clear the carpet by you know enough so that it's not dragging but this door was a little bit tight on the bottom this this Edge over here on the left side here was pretty even until it got to the bottom well luckily there was some movements in the door frame down there and I was able to pull the uh pull the frame over a little bit by putting a couple of trim screws underneath the hinge that way you're never going to see it it pulled over just what I needed right there and I solved that problem now if you're in an older house and you've got 10 layers of paint on the door or even more and your door is fitting really tight you may need to shave the door a little bit now you can take these and put them on a table saw and that works pretty well actually if you don't have a table saw you can use a hand planer and that hand planer will cut off a pretty good Edge you know eighth of an inch all the way down and it'll be pretty nice and even cut right there if you don't have a hand planer you don't have a table saw but you do have a skill saw you know a hand a rotary saw I don't recommend cutting that freehanded because it's going to be squiggly and it's just not going to look good but what you can do is you can clamp a straight edge on the door and rig the you know the distance so that it's right where your blade needs to be to cut off an eighth of an inch and when you do that and you just ride that saw up against your straight edge and you'll come up with a pretty good cut that way that'll work it's not the greatest but it will work and give you a fairly straight cut if you're finding any value in this video please subscribe to this channel I come out with videos like this as often as I can okay so if you're working with a new door frame then this part won't matter at all you can put your hinges wherever you want but we're not we're working with an established door frame and the hinge pockets are already cut out so we have to stick with these locations now by the way if you do wind up cutting your door don't cut the door from the hinge side you'll make it a little bit weaker by doing that especially if you're only taking off a small amount cut from the other side all right so I like to establish my top hinge first and you'll see why here in just a minute so let's measure this from the top all right we have seven and an eighth okay now remember earlier I said that I wanted to keep the Gap at the top at about an eighth of an inch okay so that means what I want to do is I want to measure from my door down seven inches and that'll leave the 1 8 inch Gap at the top that I wanted to keep all right so let's come down seven inches and we'll put a Mark here and let's go ahead and square this off all right next you see we have a gap here between where the hinge ended and where the door stop begins if we measure that it's right at 3 8 of an inch so we don't want to put our hinge at 3 8 of an inch on the door because it'll wind up rubbing on this and it'll be too tight right we want to leave about an eighth of an inch of a gap so what we're going to do is we're going to put the hinge pocket at a quarter of an inch all right so that way we'll leave an eighth of an inch Gap and I do like to leave two marks so we can get it fairly straight all right so you probably notice here that we're using these rounded Corners instead of these square ones like this right here these are a little bit more difficult to cut out to make that edge look nice but it is what it is that's what we're doing so I kind of like to use a square to kind of help things stay straight you know and I've got my edge here at like on my quarter inch marks so we're just going to mark this and try not to let it move now if your door is beveled meaning one side is wider than the other you'll want to make sure when you do this part to turn the hinge the right way right so this is turned to the inside of the door if your dual you just measure both sides you measure this side and you measure this side if they're both the same it's not beveled most doors aren't beveled so it's probably not going to be an issue for you but it is something to check all right so I'm going to take this out so we can cut this out now I'm going to do one with a router and then I'm going to do one with a chisel all right so to set up the router this is a very simple thing that I like to do I like to put the router on a flat surface I've got this Vise right here push it all the way down so that the blade contacts the flat surface like that and then lock it right so it stays there and then this is your depth adjustment I'll put a hinge inside the depth adjustment and tighten this up down on top of the hinge and lock this down just like that now we have our hinge depth then we will plunge the router down until it stops and lock it again and that's it now the depth of the blade is set to the depth of the hinge all right so we have our hinge pocket all drawn out now did anybody catch what I did when I marked it all that talk about putting this face in the right direction and I went and marked it backwards it was the end of the day so I don't know what to say at least I caught it before I you know cut the door and then found out oh that's backwards so I'm going to do this one with the router but I actually like to take a you know a knife and and make us scrub a nice line on here first right now by the way you're going to want to wear safety glasses for this part so yeah that's all there is to it we just got to stay within our line as best as we can [Applause] foreign fit the hinge it's nice and flush just like it should be you know it's not perfect I don't have a jig it's close enough all right now one way to help get the screw started is to go ahead and take a Phillips screwdriver and put it right in the center and then give it a little tap that screw will perfectly go down into that hole all right so what I've done here is I've hung the door on this top hinge that we just cut out but these haven't been cut out yet right so I flipped them open so they're against the door and I put my quarter inch Marks here so that I'm a quarter inch away from the edge now of course that quarter inch yours may be different depending on the distance where the hinge is from the door stop so quarter inch is what's on my door and I did the same thing on the bottom so what we can do now and now we're hung here don't be too alarmed if you try to close the door and it won't close because these haven't been cut out yet and that's pushing the door this way so if it don't close yet don't worry all right so I got my quarter inch right there so we're going to Mark the hinge right and then we're going to trace around it now when you're holding the pencil hold it like this away at that angle because if you hold it like this your mark is going to be away from the hinge and it's going to be too big so hold it at this angle and just Trace around it now we have a perfect location where our hinge is right do the same thing to the bottom hinge put it on your mark and do the same thing that I just did right there now we have two perfect locations if the hinges are in a little bit crooked it's going to transpose to the door or transfer to the door all right so we're cutting out this middle hinge here with a chisel now what I like to do first is take the Chisel and go around the whole perimeter because what will happen is is when I'm shaving this out it'll help this wood break off a little cleaner if it's already pre-cut now to get around this corner here I can't keep the Chisel flat up and down like that I have to angle it just like so and that will go right around the corner fairly straight one advantage of doing it this way is is you can do this right in your house I decided to bring it outside but I didn't have to I could have done it right there it makes a fairly minimal mess long as you got a shop vac handy all right so we got our perimeter established there now let's just go ahead and Chip Away and just keep on going until you get where you want this does give you a little bit more control over what you're cutting you know the router is you know if you make a mistake it's like oh this doesn't do that but the uh the router is you know gives you a more even bottom here so you gotta kind of chisel this until it's all pretty even now in this part here I find that a razor knife is not that bad you could use the Chisel but this actually does work too just be careful not to let it gets you all right let's give it a test fit pretty good not too bad at all all right same thing as before let's try to get our screwdriver right smack in the middle and give it a little tap and I'll go ahead and put the rest of the screws in I've already done the bottom hand so I'm going to get that one ready and then I'll meet you back in the house all right so I got the hinges on let's just go ahead and see if it all lines up very good no problem let's get our pins in so very good that worked fine doors closing fine our Gap is fairly good now if you run into a problem right where they won't go together because one is slightly higher than the other one all you have to do is loosen the screws in the door frame and give it a good wiggle they should go together put the pin in and then tighten the screws back up and that should fix that also I did a video a while back about a crooked door frame door was sagging which you can do is take a crescent wrench and bend the hinges so that they align so again right and raise that up can't do it a lot you know if you're way off then you got a big problem but if you're just a little bit off bending that hinge will work what you need to do though is prop up whichever side of the door is causing you a problem so that it'll stay and you'll want to take the pins out of at least two of the hinges so that you you know it'll move all right so the first thing I like to do to establish the doorknob location is Mark the exact height of the old one now I've already got a door striker in here because it was here from the original door so what I'll do is is I'll mark right smack in the middle of where that is at and then I'd like to take a square and then follow that over right here right so that I have a mark out here where I can see it all right then the next thing I'll do is I'll put my pencil right perfectly on the line and grab the door by the bottom and pull the door open all right now that we've got our height established there's a couple of different ways that we could go about this one is is you can get the fancy kit that comes with The Jig right here's the rest of it right here it comes with the hole saws and all that stuff oh it's all falling out anyway yeah this thing is like 25 bucks and if you go online and read the reviews it's got probably the worst reviews I've ever seen but it's kind of nice I guess you can clamp it on the door right and actually it's got two screws here to screw into the door but look how much I'm holding it firm here look how much movement that thing's got right and that's what people said it was junk so you could do it this way this allows for the two and three eighths or the two and three quarters back set right or you could take a simple five dollar square that you can get from Harbor Freight right I've got my height out here that I draw it a minute ago and line your square up to that and draw your line right there you got to paint the door anyway now you see on here 2 and 3 8 that's right to the center do the same thing on the other side of the door draw the line and then what I did to keep the drill bit the hole saw from walking around when you get it started is I took a punch and put it right on my two and three eighths and made a nice Mark right there to keep that drill bit from walking around so I'm just going to go with that I've got my own hole saw and all that stuff and I don't need that kit so I also taped the hole saw that I don't go through the door if you just drill through the door it's going to blow out the other side and it's not going to look good all right so I also changed out the drill bit in my hole saw so I can see it come out of the door earlier and I also will be able to tell because I have a mark like this on the other side if it comes out over here over here you know if it's off the center of that Mark then I know I'm not holding my drill straight so that kind of gives you an early warning put that right on my mark and try to hold the drill as straight as you can [Music] alright so I've drilled through most of the door but I've got to my tape so I need to stop so I can flip it around [Music] there we go all right so to find the center of this door the door is one and three eighths so it's 11 16 to the center so I carefully measured 11 16 and I checked it one way 11 16 and then I checked it the other way and if they match then you're in the center did the same thing here with the punch marked my center point to try to keep the drill bit from walking around now on these drill bits I didn't mention earlier the first larger hole was 2 and 1 8 and this one is one inch so that's the sizes you need I now went ahead and extended this one as well to try to give me an early warning inside of here so I can see if I'm holding it straight or not [Music] and there we go don't need no jig works fine just like that all right so I'm going to go ahead and cut my thing out for this I don't really like the looks of just putting this Barrel in there I like the whole thing so go ahead and put that in there and Center it up and you can hold it down with your thumb make sure it's centered up good and then Trace around it I already did and then you can either cut this out with a router or a chisel I'm not going to show that part because it's the same thing as cutting out the hinge if you put it in the router do like I showed you before and use this thickness put it in the router depth gauge and use that thickness to cut out the depth of this since this is curved I would use a smaller bit to get around these curves all right or if you use a chisel probably use a pretty small chisel some of these are square and those are actually easier to cut out with a chisel but this one has rounded Corners so I'm going to do the best I can on that all right so I went ahead and cut this out with the router it's just easier and I used a smaller bit probably about quarter inch so I could get around these round areas right here and I went ahead and pre-drilled the uh the holes to keep anything from cracking now remember we set this back at two and three eighths well most of these things have a operating thing here there's two and three quarters there's two and three eighths so just make sure that that matches up with what your back set is and it's nice and flush oh yeah and I'm just going to use the same doorknob now one thing to note is is you don't really need a big fancy screwdriver or an angled one like this one right here I just took this simple screwdriver and put a piece of heat shrink over it if you're worried about scratches you can do the same thing yeah the screwdriver sits at an angle but you know it's not that big of a deal all right well hopefully the door works let's try it perfect works like a champ all right guys well if you've watched till this point I really appreciate it I hope this video has been helpful for you thanks for watching

Channel: The Home Improvement Channel

Views: 38,010

Keywords: The Home Improvement channel, how to install a blank door, installing a blank door from scratch, diy, how to, blank door knob installation, slab door knob installation, slab door upgrade, blank door upgrade, blank door hinges, slab door hinges

Id: YG0u_nt6ZDc

Length: 19min 29sec (1169 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 18 2023