Simple carpentry work (entry door/knob/lock and two sliding closets)

urbandad, this is a rental. it is cheaper to add a couple of inches then buy and hang a door. if there is no saddle in place a sweep may or may not take that gap up. and in so far as adding poplar to the bottom; even with the varying degrees of success, that is probably the way to go.

A saddle and a sweep can probably cover 2 inches in a pinch, and is an easy DIY job, but it sure won’t look as good. It’s also worth considering that it may be easier to obtain a door that fits the space. I believe you can still get the craftsman style or 5 panel art deco style doors that were common in the 30s. That said, you could just screw and glue a piece of poplar to the bottom of the door and take your chances. It’s been done by many with varying results. But you may be able to get a new door slab for less than even that would cost.

Repairing old doors can be really difficult. The structural parts of the door are usually also the finish. If you rebuild a door by replacing the stiles and rails, you essentially just made a new door. If you take apart the door and add longer stiles to extend it down, you basically have a new with some recycled wood components. As steve said, you can splice new wood onto the bottom of the door, which may or may not hold up, but it would not really be the same quality as a door with full length stiles and rails. It might even be compa rable to get a custom replica door than to really do a a serious job extending this door. If you like the door, perhaps it could be used in another location.

ok, if you get the right person to put an additional couple inches of wood to the bottom of the door like that with the right adhesive, the kickplates and additional stability will not be needed. sand it all out and the seem will be barely visible. the adhesive i would use on something like this costs $335 for a two gallon kit. i would not do this on an entry door. read on:

it is not professional for a door maker to run a piece of wood across the width of a door. the stiles (the up and down members) expand and contract different than the cross member and can cause glue failure. we see doors all over the city that were modified this way and they are failing. part of the problem is they attached the wood to an uneven or damaged surface and used thin adhesives that need a tight bond. still, the correct way to do it is extend the stiles by cutting them back in sections and splice new wood in to lengthen them. we can add a sandwich of wood to the rail (cross member) and the best way to do this is make tenons on the cross member an over lap those with the i nlays from the stiles. that said, years ago i had a customer of very limited means who lived in the same house she had been born in and she wanted a divided light door put back the way it had been before she put a steel door in during the 1970’s. but we could not get one that size. so i did what we are not supposed to do and so far as i know, it has survived ok; my glue surfaces were perfectly matched. since that time, i have move on to better adhesives..

Hey Steve, thanks for the info! I’ll follow up via email (and send you a couple of photos), but yeah, I’d definitely love to chat with you more about the project. I did remove a backup deadbolt and a chain-lock so there’s some patching to be done on the trim, but I also have extra trim pieces. The whole thing is painted (with several layers of paint!), and will get an additional coat or two once we’re done to hide anything. (For the door that needs an extra two inches, we also bought two kick-plates to go over it on each side, to hide the fixed portion and to provide a bit more stability.)

hey this is steve writing under a new screen name better connected to my business. thank you for mentioning me here.

so this is what i do now. after years of only RESTORING doors, i had learned so much that i realized there was an opportunity performing hourly repairs. so now i do both – i always have a pair of door on the bench being restored and once a week(and only once a week) i go out and perform an hourly rate repairs for one customer (an afternoon). this includes a lot of resetting hinges, mortising doors and installing mortise locks, including baldwin which i often source for people. i also will bore and install cylindrical deadbolts and do other things that are door related but floating somewhere between what a carpenter would do and what a locksmith would do. i also replace pocket door tracks and beginning two years ago, when the Montauk Club called me (i had done a lot of work for one of their board members) and asked me to fix and adjust their top hung pocket doors i began servicing top hung and have vintage parts here now.

for me to do thi s kind of work and make it pay for me and make it pay for the customer, i have to look at photos and get a half hour long conversation on the phone. this way i am prepared and can arrive with what we need, no running to the hardware (and if i do have to run to the hardware and it was something i should have had with me, i do not bill the time; the elevated first hour covers that).

i am busy enough doing this that in the past week i could afford to spend 1/2 hour on the phone telling someone what was wrong with their pocket doors and they called me back and told me they took care of two of them by themselves but might need me to come fix a third (and offered to pay for my time on the phone; i declined) and friday i got a call from a building having trouble with a door knob and split spindle on a mortise lock. I told him what to do, he could not get it so i stopped by, fixed it and told him he needed a new knob for one side and that if he would get on and screw it on, i would not charge him anything for the visit; i arrived home a half hour later to find a message asking me to come take care of that and something else this week. i tried.

OP, this is what we do when we encounter short doors IF we can do it and make it look like that is how it was made: we close the top of the frame down a little and lower the door. MOST of my work is on entry doors and because the casement is often up above a transom or some other wood enclosure, this is easier to do and hide the fact that it has been done and since there are no other doors along the wall, no one sees one shorter and no one is the wiser. to try to do this on an interior door and perhaps have to lower the casement (i can now trim the sides of casement in place which i could not do years ago without making a mess; painted wood is easier if it a a little rough, we can hide it) could be problematic and may mean damaging some plaster. maybe it can be done, maybe not. maybe messy. adding wood to the bottom of doors in a professional manner is pricey and that is the only way we do it on entry doors – the pricey way. perhaps on this door and if it is painted, we can sneak wood across the bottom and glue it so it will hold (we now have epoxies that give a little with the wood) and sand it out.

if you call for this and ask, i will probably stop by and take a looksie and either give you an hourly estimate or prepare a quote. it sounds as if it should be quoted as that is the only fair way to do some jobs.