Installing an Exterior Door Perfectly - The Right Way

in this video we're going to show you how to hang your very own pre-hung exterior door and how to do it yourself and we'll show you all of the pitfalls to avoid and how to do it perfectly every time most people don't know the requirements of what is needed to correctly install a perfect door and get that textbook eighth of an inch reveal line all the way around the door so let's start there the four rules for you to remember when installing a door correctly are level plumb true and square so your door must be level as you can see here by my diagram and on all sides the door must be plumb which means it's perfectly vertical so your door cannot be tilted in either direction it must be perfectly straight up and down and the door must be square so you have to put a carpenter square on every corner and it should be completely exactly perfectly with no gaps 90 degrees and lastly the door must be true which basically means you've checked this thing six different ways to sunday with your level on every possible surface front back and side and you've checked all the corners for 90 degrees and if it's not that way then it's not true ideally your pre-hung door and door frame form a near-perfect factory manufactured rectangular shape that is perfectly square to the eye so this is why i always recommend that you buy a pre-hung door where your door slab is already hung on the hinges with a perfect eighth inch textbook reveal line going all the way around and then of course your doorknobs are already the holes are pre-drilled for the doorknobs and the latch and the deadbolt so here is the very core strategy for you hanging your door perfectly this perfect rectangle shape must now fit inside of this imperfect square rough-in opening that your builder constructed to install the door into so we accommodate this pre-hung door inside the rough-in opening using wood shims that fill in the space between the door frame and the rough-in opening so this is an exaggerated case here where you see we have a bowed stud and maybe an uneven top and believe me i see this stuff all the time so once it's in place and the shims that you see here all the way around the door that i've put here these wedge the door into a perfectly level plum square and true installation so let's do it here we need to find all of the screws some are hidden some you can see they're quite visible some you have to dig out some have been puttied over or painted over so right here you want to score all the way down on the outside of the molding and be very careful and we just want to make a score line there so that we won't tear apart any paint or anything when we go to separate this see this is why we score it because when you when you miss a little spot you'll see just a little bit of peeled paint now normally you'd want to use a crowbar or something but when you're a homeowner and maybe you don't have all of those tools this is what you do and you just be gentle with it you're a surgeon and you just want to pry it out a little bit and then the rest of it will come out [Music] [Applause] [Music] comes right off be careful with the safety of these nails folks either use a hammer to push the nail down or make sure this stays on the ground flat like that you don't want nails sticking up boom done give it to me these are the osha required sandals say hello to my little friend shout out to my new friend [Music] i definitely found something here [Music] [Applause] [Music] now that we've sawzalled it and separated it there we go you can see it's starting to move yeah so you just gotta pry it loose so sometimes these frames don't come out like those two minute videos you see on home depot that are filmed in uh fantasy land and a controlled laboratory this is real world folks so sometimes you're going to find little stuck areas and you may have to work a little while these other videos online make it look like it's uh 15 seconds and you're done sometimes you just have to go old school on it we have a redneck pounding block right here put the redneck block up against the frame and then give it a few whacks see so i don't know if it's like on the upper corner or something it seems like it's still a bit stuck up there yeah i felt it right there there was another screw or fastener or something in there that we didn't see we never find them all they get covered and painted over so if i try to swing out this side see it actually just breaks apart so that says to me there's still something up in here holding it we need to work some more on it yeah so sometimes you forget a screw what would happen was the bottom screw that was here actually pulled out of the plate and you can see it right there see that's what was holding it right in there so now if we can just we have to just rip it out now because yeah just rip it right off of there and then we can unscrew it see one two three bubba thanks a lot i always like to clean off the frame as much as i can slide the new door in there's no obstructions everything's nice and clean [Music] now this is where you need to make sure you have all of the right fasteners we have concrete wall on this side so we're going to need tapcon anchors those are the blue screws and then on this side we have wood so here we can just use regular screws and here in florida i prefer to use like the three inch and above for hurricane and for building code purposes okay so here we're going to be using the star drive deck mate screws and i like these better because it's a lot easier to drive when you're using these stars here instead of phillips head and then they usually come with their own bit yes you don't have a star bit these are t25s now before we set the door frame into place we want to run some silicone all the way down here on both sides of the frame and we're going to run some over here as well and we only start with the hinged side first because everything hinges on us being level perfect it has to be level square and plumb so now we're adding the silicone into these corners here [Music] and now we added some silicone along the bottom there i usually try to do three good sized rows of the silicone so that the sill plate at the bottom will rest in it okay so now we just lift the frame up and into place and set everything up in there okay this side's in so now you can go around that side and give it a lift and a kick at the same time [Music] do it on the bottom hinge yeah i will all right so we took two screws out here and because what we're going to do is the the bottom and the top screw are going to be the tap cons that go all the way into that concrete wall and that's the best place to do it we're going to put shims behind it but first we need to make sure that the door is level plumb and true and all that see so here you can see it's level right there in the middle of the bubble and then if you check this edge of it here you can see it's level but i want to check square so you always want to make sure it's nice and square and you can see how it fits perfectly right nice and snug up in there and it's straight across the top so that's how we know that we hung this hinge side and got it nice level plumb and true and square okay so we just tacked in this screw here it's not in all the way but it's just enough to hold the door into position if we didn't do it level and everything it this would not have been square and it smacks in there nicely and remember you always check square right with the hinges that's not the side that was screwed it was screwed in right here so this is where you have to check the square so let me show you something as we close the door and i want to show you what's happening here so you see how you you can see the gap like you need you know the reveal all the way around but it's hitting right here that's what you're going to see a lot of it's going to hit somewhere at some point so we want to try to fix this you see how it'll flex here so once we drive the first screw into the wood there it'll widen this here and then the door should fit here it is watching the outside see it's just barely hitting there so once we screw this in and move it to the right a little more it should open up our reveal for us make sure you don't fill it all up tight with the shims because remember we want this thing to move like this right so give it room to breathe this is where experience comes in you don't see this on those two minute home depot videos where everything is done in fantasyland watch it tug in as we screw it in and tighten it so did you see how it tightened against this and pinched it now it's super tight there now let's see how the door space looks the reveal the door wouldn't close and now it just from one screw made all the difference in the world it made that door close because it gave us a little bit of reveal space we also like to add shims over by the deadbolts to give more strength here behind them and when we're done we're probably going to add some right in here directly behind the screws for the screw plate so we'll run those deep and all the way into the wood there okay so now that we've added the second one the second set of shims there see it closes nicely and look at that reveal that's textbook [Music] there you go okay and then okay so as we look around the weather stripping we don't see any light coming in there so that's good so that's what you want to do you want to inspect all the way around here now of course over here we still have light coming in yeah this right here all needs to get sealed up well with the foam and everything so here's a close-up look of all of our shims and what we had to do you want to try to make sure your door frame is in the middle of the space okay so as you can see here's the final product and it's all set up but you can see how many of the shims that we stuck in here i like to make sure that i'm always behind the hinges right near the hinges in the middle of the door the bottom middle of the door and then this hinge down here and this hinge here and i always when i'm behind the hinges i like to run the bolts right through the hinge right through the shim and right into the concrete that's the best way to do it i think this hinge side is the most important side so this has to be completely vertical see so it's most important to have this hinge side taken care of first once he's satisfied once he's level plum and true and you've checked it this way and it's perfectly right in the middle and then you of course check the door frame this way and then you take your carpenter square and you check the top corner there and that corner over there both of those upper corners have to be square if they're not the door's not going to close then we have three across the top and then of course always within six inches of the top and bottom now we didn't need the shim down here we already pulled out this shim here but you can see i always do them right here near the door knobs and we're going to do a couple of more here by the deadbolt plate once we get that one installed but you can see how many we do here okay and then once your hinge side is set up and it's perfectly level plumbing true then as you start screwing in these on this side it will suck the door frame this way see it'll force it this way to wind it open there and it'll give you that gap you need on this side here to close your door here we had to shim up the bottom plate because the cement floor was uneven now that it's time to remove all of your shims three ways you can do it you can either just try to snap them off but when you have the thick end like this usually it's not going to snap off cleanly they just split we prefer to use the multi tool it's the quickest or you can use your utility knife and score it and snap it like this [Music] do [Music] just stick the straw back in there and let it fill up the whole cavity you can see how it's expanding [Music] i'm sure you learned a lot of useful diy information on this video and you'll want to make sure you're subscribed because you don't want to miss out on any of these other videos that we do here like you can see kitchen remodeling we have bathroom remodeling tips for you and all sorts of tiling videos and we cover of course all of the great shop with me is at lowe's costco sam's club home depot and of course tool review videos and we cover all sorts of engineering disasters and some of our subscribers also know look at all of these great tool giveaways we do from time to time so make sure you're subscribed because you don't want to miss out on these we give away the best stuff around folks so thank you so much for tuning in today folks and we will see you on the next one

Channel: jeffostroff

Views: 21,035

Keywords: door installation, home improvement, how to install a door, install, install prehung interior door, install prehung exterior door, install prehung door, install prehung interior door with trim, install front door, install exterior door, install exterior door frame, how to install exterior door frame kit, diy door, diy door installation, steel door installation tips, door, interior door installation, how to

Id: eWUpxU5mExM

Length: 14min 53sec (893 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 26 2022