How To Repair Rotted Door Jambs

visit the onus carpenter comm and get your home related questions answered by a trade expert hey everybody I'm Nathan James with the honest Carpenter calm and honest carpenter consulting and in this video I'm going to show you how to fix or replace rotted portions of door jams like this one what's happened here is that the bottom of the jamb has basically sucked up water off of the threshold and the jams of these prehung prefabricated doors are almost always made of pine that's very porous material and it's not appropriate for contact with the wet surface I don't know why they don't steal the end grains of these prefabricated doors but they never do and so you see this happen over and over again on exterior doors so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna cut out a controlled portion of the lower part of this jam and I'm gonna replace it with treated wood that's a fashioned into a shape that will fit right in here and it will also be able to hold the weather stripping it's kind of tricky but I'll show you how to do that gone ahead and pulled the weather stripping out here to start and measured up about 16 inches and I used a combination square tomorrow a good perpendicular line across the face perfectly straight that way and what I'm going to do is cut right at this control line with a multi oscillating tool if you're wondering what a multi oscillating tool is it's this thing right here it's a great tool for making plunge cuts on the trim in a house I've read a whole article on it I'll link it in the description below but basically it just lets you make very controlled smooth cuts and straight lines straight into materials so here you can see I've already begun a knotch that's the hardest part you can't want a whole thing like a telescope and pass it very slowly across that control line that you made from yourself and I could probably demonstrate further cutting the material like right now so I've made my cut all the way through it's okay if you go just a little bit overboard caulk is gonna hide that and this is actually gonna be behind the weather stripping saves you just don't want to go too far over into the brick mold after that I've gone ahead with a knife and scored a clean line between the brick mold and the jamb all the way down to the threshold and what I'm gonna do now is gonna begin to break or crack this whole part out even the parts that are good I'll probably try to split it right at the middle and I want to get this removed I'm not gonna take out this part of the jamb that's holding the hinged this rarely rots because it's it's sort of inside I basically never seen it rot on one of these rotted doors we're just gonna take out the portion that tends to rot which is the outward facing exterior portion and I'm probably gonna have to break it out using a little bit of force a hammer and a big screwdriver here's what I mean by a big screwdriver we call it a demolition screwdrivers are great for banging it into a piece of wood and using leverage to break up pieces out I'm gonna have to do this pretty slowly but you can see the amount of moisture that's in this bottom area fortunately the wood that uses finger jointed so it actually comes apart pretty easily it's put together with these tiny sections I'm just gonna have to get a line coming all the way up to our control cut and just very carefully pry things out don't mess up the brick mold and don't mess up the good part of the jamb if you can avoid it you can see I'm actually starting to crack out pieces of a full lower jamb now I've got a big hole here at the bottom I can feel the house wrap behind it I'm just gonna keep working it it wants to form a split right here I'm not gonna let that happen I'm gonna take it off little piece by little piece working my way over until I get to the thinner area where these two parts are connected and I'll probably be able to just carefully like cut that with a knife or a chisel more cleanly just go slowly when you're doing this and you'll be able to get this big piece taken out little bits at a time really doesn't take that long maybe 15 minutes there I finally got to the bottom of it just pull out that last piece I'm just gonna clean up this edge of the inner part of the jamb just a bit and also just make sure I got a really good flat surface up here but that's it you can see the house wraps in pretty good shape that's what we want to see this guitar paper that it kind of acts as a light vapor barrier between the house and everything outside the house and yeah just do a bit more cleanup but this is what you should see when you get to the bottom of it sweep all that away and got your threshold right there in this hall is space so this parts a little tricky to explain but I'll give it a shot the reason I cut these diamond patterns out is because the material that I'm replacing with is not as thick as the actual jamb the actual jams one-and-a-quarter we're gonna use really dry treated deck board which is only one-inch thick so I'm gonna need to add quarter-inch shims behind it to make sure that our depth is getting set correctly and to do that I'm going to need to make sure the shims are adhesive to rough opening framing in there hence the little window in the door diamond cuts and then I can adhesive and shoot our replacement piece to those shims this thing's not gonna be really inclined to move but that should give it all the bearing it needs directly back to actual framing and we can just do that using shims and good interior exterior construction adhesive like this we went ahead and ripped our deck board to width which is about 4 and 7/16 and I also put a 5 degree miter cut on the bottom that's the pitch of most thresholds windowsills tend to be 15 degrees the vegetables tend to be about 5 degrees so I went ahead and put that cut on the bottom cut at the width now I have a slightly more complicated cut to make here because we need a little groove or slot or dado in the front of this thing to accept the weather stripping which needs about 1/8 inch gap to slide into so what I'm gonna do now is create that groove on the inner cheek of our replacement piece here and really I just want a little tongue on the end that's as wide as this one which is about 1/4 inch so I'm just gonna fashion that on the table saw it doesn't really matter how far back this group goes a little further is better because it in a clearer room for the inner tenon or tongue or whatever of the jam that we left well we just need a piece cut to the right shape the kind of clam shell in here but still leave a groove on the inside that's what makes this repair complicated with that bad and I think when you see my replacement piece it'll make a bit more sense yeah this gives you a better idea what I was describing there we cut this kind of big rabbit in here and again this is gonna be the edge that points inward toward the house and our weather stripping is actually going to sit right here and the way I did that is I just did one rip leaving about three H which is the size of that little tongue and then I actually just like to do is set the blade if my eye for that next one and I make a pass that cuts out the excess material without cutting any higher up into our little 3/8 tongue and I just run it all the way through and you get a nice long rabbit like that and I left my little 5 degree code I always always make a note of it so I know where it is in relation to the tongue that I just cut so now I can cut this thing to precise length at the top about 16 inches and make the shins and I'll almost be ready to install it looks good it's right back in the slot and here you can see the little gap where we still need to bring it out flush so that lets me know that my shams need to be right about 1/4 inch just like I thought ends are cut and ready for the test fit to make this easier for yourself just put one little dab of glue on the back of these and take shim press it on and and the shim will stay in place when you set the piece in this place and that feels good and flush I can tell that quarter-inch shims just right there's gonna be a little room for adjustment but that oughta works and now I can take this back out and I will put my shims adhesive into the diamonds to go ahead and cover up this space where I made a little gap in the vapor barrier the last thing I want to do before I install is go ahead and soften these edges that are gonna be visible on the door itself it has just like a little tiny 8 inch roundover something you can replicate that with some sanding paper or sanding block so just gently run up and down this sharp edge and that'll just kind of ease that outside corner I got the edges softened on my piece there now I'm basically ready to install so I'm just gonna run a bunch of adhesive on my shim pieces just like this more than I'm showing now and then I'm gonna run some on the underside of the continuous piece of the jam and even though maybe just a little bit on the backside of my brick mold right here you really should be afraid to kind of really fill in this area for pieces and even a little bit on the back of the piece and then I'll just take my replacement piece ease it into place here and I will shoot it on with 2-inch Brad nails replacement piece of shot on just really maybe four Brad nails carefully placed and then I kind of tap and pull them pried the thing until it's right where I want it and then I'm not gonna mess with it that much I'm gonna let the adhesive set up but you can see how well the lined it is just by sighting down the faces in the inside corner that looks really good I use should have mentioned this in beginning I use shop dry treated lumber in this case this lumber has been sitting inside it had time to dry out so I'll be able to caulk and paint this pretty much right away and I will just use the paint that the client supplies to match this kind of cream color but once this has time to dry up it'll be good but it's really probably not gonna want to go anywhere in the meantime everything is nice and flush and so we're almost done here we are coughed up ready for paint after it dries just a little bit I brought the weather stripping right down went right into the little groove rabbit that we made you're always gonna see a little surgical score on these things it's not a big deal the paint's really gonna help cover it up even some caulking just a little bit of sanding can almost make it vanish all together that's looking good the last little tip I will leave you with is this side never rotted but it's made of the same material and so it could so to prevent any rot what I like to do is take the oscillating multi-tool run it very carefully underneath the bottom jam cut out maybe just like eighth of an inch or something and I'm gonna run some just silicone in there that will prevent the lower grain from this Jam on the other side ever soaking it up and you won't have to do this repair but if you do that is how you do a lower Jam reprint repair with treated material and for more tips and articles check out the honest Carpenter calm please hit like and subscribe below thanks for watching the video we're now offering live video consultations and phone consultations to homeowners nationwide to get your most important home related questions answered by a trade expert just visit the honest Carpenter calm

Channel: The Honest Carpenter

Views: 1,822,862

Keywords: door jamb, door jambs, door, jambs, jamb, jamb repair, door jamb repair, how to repair door jambs, rotted door, rotted door jamb, door jamb rot, jamb rot, fix rotted door jambs, fix door jambs

Id: LfAt1am87JE

Length: 11min 32sec (692 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 19 2018