A customer in High Wycombe wanted a new timber front door fitted because the old one had started to rot in one corner. The plan was to reuse the existing mortice sash lock, fit new handles and replace only the door because the frame was apparently fine.
Sounds straightforward, doesn’t it? Once the old door came off and I measured the frame, the height was spot on but the width varied by roughly a quarter of an inch from top to bottom. Result. 🙂
That turned a simple replacement into a fair amount of planing and chiselling to get the new door sitting properly. Put it this way: by the time I had finished, you could barely see where the original hinge marks had been.
I also offered to upgrade the old rusty hinges rather than reuse hinges intended for internal doors. The replacements were BS EN-compliant and much more appropriate for the new external door.
This was the first door installation I had done that took me more than two hours from start to finish, but the end result was worth it. It might well have been one of the strongest and most level front doors in High Wycombe by the time I was done. 🙂
