Sticking out a shaker door
I saw a post from stevecym
“and op, now that i think about that 5 panel door i ordered from dykes. i think we ordered a “shaker” door and i sticked it out with period trim – “panel molding”.
I was actually about to the same thing, adding mitered sticking to a bunch of shaker 4 panel doors. I’m trying to find a carpenter who can do this for me, because oddly most shops seem unable to do it for a reasonable price, it ends up coming out to like 250 bucks a door, which is a lot since I have like 20 doors to do. I’m considering doing it myself or hiring someone to do it at an hourly rate, because I don’t think it will take more than a week if you work smart. But am I wrong on this?
hkapstein
in General Discussion 4 years and 4 months ago
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andriywww1990 | 4 years and 3 months ago
@resto: in her defense, she has not made it my problem and has offered to pay me to rip it out and start anew if i felt that was the best course of action but i really don’t hang crown anymore and have not in over 10 years (for those reading this, i still do door casements because i only work on doors). i consider crown to be menial work at this point and would rather stick out urbandads doors. i am weighing everything here though including considering that the parking is pretty easy on her street.
so the others see this:
i do not get as mad at the customers in this situation as i do with the contractors who do things like this. like with the two itinerants (fly by nights, gypsies, travelers, knackers; whatever offensive name we might want to call them) who charged a customer $1600 to perform a 4 hour caulking job and they did not even do it right. people like this give us all a bad name and make people suspicious and when these contractors low ball (underbid), we always have to justify our prices against their crappy work and unprofessionalism without knoc king the competition which would sound unprofessional.
urbandad, i am sorry i stole your post but it felt like an appropriate time to say it. there is stuff that has to be said that many people do not realize, especially when dealing with contractors.
restorationcontractor | 4 years and 3 months ago
Hey Steve, sounds like a pain it the ass job to fix someone else’s screw up. You’re too nice, I know, I fall into the same habit. Customer hired another contractor who screwed up how does it become your problem? Is your time worth any less than your customers. You always talk about the value of craftsmen, follow your own advise. If you are going to help her and fix it, charge her for it!
Urbandad sorry to hijack your thread!
andriywww1990 | 4 years and 3 months ago
urbandad:
its steve with a new screen name.
a professional would not even attempt it or think about it.
when i was five years old, i was given a hand-me-down pedal go cart that had my uncle’s name on the panel behind the seat. i did not want people thinking that was my name so i opened a can of paint – after my mother told me NOT to do it – and I painted over the name. to my horror, i got some paint on my jacket. i went into the bathroom and tried washing the oil base paint off with water. my mother caught me and that was when i learned that there are oil base paints and water base paints and that you cannot mix the two. i never forgot that lesson and it was not a pleasant one.
hkapstein | 4 years and 3 months ago
Would be hard to thin water base with mineral spirits and not notice something was wrong, perhaps they bought if for cleanup. I’ve never tried cleaning up waterbase with mineral spirits, so I don’t know what that would look like. Either way, it wouldn’t really change the remediation process.
stevecym | 4 years and 3 months ago
do you want to hear the rest of the story? it gets better. she was supposed to have me come back; i think i have said that. the other guy sells her on having him do the paint and SHE orders the paint. she tells me the job she did has weird streaks in it. so i ask for the bill of sale from Fine and what else did she order? Mineral spirits. with water bourne paint? i am wondering if the contractor cut the waterbourne paint with mineral spirits.
hkapstein | 4 years and 3 months ago
@stevecym, if I were in your shoes, I would bid the job as a full strip and repaint, and if you can use a trick to knock it back to the oil, you can either give her a little break or keep the difference, but I think the contractor who painted latex over oil should be taking part of the hit. If he’d agree to reinstall, it might be a better bet to just run new trim and price that out than to deal with stripping it, but I don’t know how much there is or how big it is.
Interestingly, we’ve discussed before that I’m still a fan of oil based polyurethane on floors compared to waterborne. I’m a holdout there I guess, although I’m about to try a new product that I’m super excited about, a hardwax oil! More on that after I put some down.
However, when it comes to paints, I’m more inclined to use Latex/waterborne. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with oil paints, and fine paints of europe makes some of the best. But paint is easier to touch up than poly, and latex paint on wood is probably a little more durable due to it’s flexibility, so I’d rather just go to a ben moore dealer and get a match than have to order fresh oil paint and endure the fumes every couple years. It doesn’t look quite the same as oil paint, but personally I think it’s looks equally good unless you’re going for a very specific finish.
stevecym | 4 years and 3 months ago
Thank you urbandad. I was beginning to think about what might remove it without disturbing the oil. I will call fine again and run this by them or will bring alcohol with me – if i even decide to get involved.
hkapstein | 4 years and 3 months ago
@stevecym, I just thought of a possible idea for your on your client’s paint issue. Most waterborne paints will dissolve in alcohol even after curing, but oil based paints won’t. You might be able to take some denatured alcohol, and a scotchbrite pad or similar, and just scrub it off. I’ve done this before, but not on something as large as a door.
hkapstein | 4 years and 3 months ago
I just want to say, this is not about shopping a job like crazy until someone underbids it. I’m learning about the best way to get this work done, and I’m looking at different ways to do the fabrication. Different shops have different setups, and different labor costs. But once I identify the right shop to do this type of work, I’d like to build a relationship and use them again. Yes if it were a one off situation, I would probably just tool up and cut the trim myself. There’s a lot of work I can do myself, but I don’t want to do everything myself, it would take too long. It makes a lot more sense to have a shop make moulding than to do it on side, and I think using a picture framer to miter them is a neat solution.
Now on the paint topic, I’ve been experimenting with the newish Scuff-x paint from Benjamin Moore, and I’m liking it a lot so far. It’s a single component waterborne paint, that’s really easy to work with, and appears to resist scuffs and allow aggressive scrubbing out of scuff. I’m thinking for the interior doors, this could be a nice feature. I can’t see t he difference from the regal or aura lines in color or texture, but perhaps others could.
@stevecym, painting latex over oil should be possible, with appropriate prep, but in this case why do it? I think we both know the answer. If I were having a door painted, I would certainly specify the paint to use and the prep I wanted. I’m having something painted now, and I bought the materials ahead so the painter just has to show up and do the job. If I bought the wrong paint, that’s on me, so it’s one less thing he needs to worry about. But I do understand that many people who have never held a tool will shop a job to they hear a rock bottom price, and they get results to match.
stevecym | 4 years and 3 months ago
@restoration: what you say is true but at least he did not have these people running to his house wasting valuable time; he spoke to them on the phone.
my neighbors are job shoppers. for the smallest jobs. even when they saw the plastic fence a few doors down that they liked and got a good reference for the contractor, they had to go and call 5 fence companies. i watched this unfold, they drag the contractors here wasting their time, and gas and dumping carbons in the atmosphere for what? to save $50 on a 20’x30 fence? in the end they went with the company who did the job a few doors down. the moral here: find someone you like who has a good reputation and go with it.
there is a time to job shop. if the job is big. if you had no good contractor leads and pulled someone out of the phone book/off the web blind. if something someone says does not sound right. or if you got two prices and they are miles apart and you need a third to judge. but in truth, most legitimate and honest contractors – and this is more true with trades like plumbers a nd electricians because of the cost of their insurance – have little wiggle room in their quotes. if a price is low, something is off; the contractor is doing something wrong and he is not taking food off his table – so its not his family getting short changed, it is the customer.
that said, urbandad was right to make a couple calls and experience will tell him where to go first the more he does this. i could bet he first called a big shop which might follow the laws to a t and that costs money. so he called some smaller people and found they could do it for less. he might find that the people who do it less don’t change the saw blades as often as they should (for a job like his, put a new blade on the saw).
whatever job shoppers do, only call legally operating and licensed people. the more a contractor exposes him or herself, the more scrutiny they are under from the public and government agencies, and the less likely that we are contributing to abuse of employees and trash dumped on the side of the highway and enabling people who might go as far as to commit outright fraud.
JohnHancock | 4 years and 3 months ago
Lol
restorationcontractor | 4 years and 4 months ago
Probably could have done the job in the time spent overthinking it, talking about it and calling every shop on the East coast for quotes…..
stevecym | 4 years and 4 months ago
part of why i wrote that about shopping jobs is just this morning i got a flurry of emails from someone who had me pre paint and deliver some trim for her – over a year ago. of course i primed and dusted and did it all. i used fine paints of europe (which she asked for and of course i go for the best, the oil; until today i did not know they made water or water borne) and she had already contracted someone to do the trim installation. ok. i was supposed to come back and fill their nail holes, sand again, spot prime, spot paint and sand 220 over all of it and tack and apply a second coat. her contractor said he’d do it all and she did not say this to me but i bet it was for 1/2 of what i would have charged. between them, they made two mistakes; she ordered the waterborne paint to go over my oil and he did not tack it off. i had her call him and ask what he tacked it with and she just wrote me and said he had no idea what she was talking about when she asked. and when i told her to ask, i told her ask “what did you tack it with” not “did you tack it” as he w ould have realized he skipped a step and said “yes” to what she was asking (i know how to force them into lying and they usually still give the wrong answer).
this is not the first time this has happen with a customer. if they swallow their pride and tell me the story and even if they admit the price was a lot less than mine, i sometimes try to help. i am not sure the best course of action but she has so far sent me about 12 emails today offering to have me replace the molding, prime and paint. i am trying to see if we can sand the waterborne off, reprime, sand and maybe reprime again and paint. and for god’s sake, use a tack cloth. if i was like some of the other people out there, i would up my prices by 25% and take advantage of this situation. i won’t do that; i will either do it for what i would charge or advise her and walk away.
btw, i had to call Fine today for this problem. i am worried if we try to sand the water borne off, it we do not get it all, it will tear and ball up and leave rough edges. so i put a question to Fine and told them what i had always been taught ( i am saying this as you commented about it on another post here): that we cannot put latex over oil. i did not respond back to you when you said we can put latex over oil as i thought perhaps things have changed in the decades since i began doing this but the gent at Fine said this is still the case, unless you prime. what i was thinking when i read what you said and that was that maybe you don’t want a hard finish over soft (oil over water) as the hard will crack and chip (never put poly over wax). that may have some truth but water over oil does not adhere and it will peel near edges; it is bad in high traffic areas on doors, etc.
in short, this is why we don’t shop jobs. this is what happens and whatever it is and even if i do my best for her, it will cost a lot more than if it had been done right the first time.. and lastly, the people who make these mistakes don’t bother reading books and calling the manufacturer (the customer made another mistake that i will not detail but the contractor should have caught it; it was bad) to get advice and even if someone tells them how to do it, it usually means more work and they cannot be bothered.
stevecym | 4 years and 4 months ago
no, i would rather not make interior doors. i had these people in ohio. they were great. i will look again. i think it was interior doors direct.
hkapstein | 4 years and 4 months ago
Thanks Steve, I do hear you, and I may have to do something a little more interesting because jeld wen doesn’t make the panel pattern I want in an 84″ shaker, so I may have to fabricate about 4 doors. If that’s something interesting for you, perhaps we should talk. I can get them made in poplar for about 300-350 or so for a prehung unit, but with freight and headaches, I can make some room in those. That’s excluding the panel trim of course.
stevecym | 4 years and 4 months ago
urban: in truth, i am running a business and to make that work, i have to sometimes do repetitive or mundane tasks. sticking out doors is one of them – every door that comes through this shop has to have molding work done to them. so long as people are willing to pay me and i can do it professionally, i do it. i would shine shoes if people wanted to pay me.
i read what dork says. we generally do not glue the trim in. none of the old doors we work on have the trim glued in. we never have any problems not gluing it and sometimes if we are worried about a piece pulling away, we place the brads in the middle in pairs, angling away from one another, sort of the way they guys did it a hundred years ago. i am not sure where he is coming from except perhaps the furniture making area which would be done with no nails at all. also, perhaps people think it is necessary because with modern doors, with machined styles and rails, the “trim” is part of the wood structure of the door.
i’ll add something else here and i am not saying this to you and maybe not to the others regularly on here but there are people who might need to know that job shopping is not a good idea. YOU will be ok with this because it is pretty much wisywig (what you see…) and sometimes others get lucky. I get calls from people who job shop and i stay away from them (they will not appreciate what i do). what happens when people job shop is they start calling the highest talent (the people most likely to treat the job like it was going in their own house – or better) and when they do not like the prices they hear, they keep calling until they get a price they like. I got a call from someone wanting doors done in manhattan last fall. the woman let it slip that they were calling a lot of people because with an 8 unit coop, they had to find the best price (this is why coops should not self manage; let a manager do it and he will not show you the quotes from the less qualified as he will not risk his job and does not want to deal with shoddy contractors. that way the owners don’t know about the 20% they could have saved and that 20% will not nag them and give them ulcers for the next twenty years). i told her “if price is more important to you than quality, i would rather pass”. she told me they have to go with the lowest price. i politely excused myself from the call but got an email from her later saying “best price yes, but no compromise on quality”. that was one of the most ignorant statements i have ever read. she does not understand that she will shop the job to death until she finds someone who is either willing to take the short cuts to make it happen or someone less experienced who will not put the time or quality of materials into it. something has to give; it is a recipe for disaster.
i had to say that because there might be people out there less familiar with all this and they might read what you say and realize you know a lot and are current and think “oh, this is what the smart money does, they job shop”. it is ok to do for some mundane tasks but even that, some shoddy contractors can find a way to screw those tasks up. but when it comes to craft work and things requiring a lot of skill, that is not the way to go. you need the people who have been doing this the longest.
hkapstein | 4 years and 4 months ago
Ok cool, I think that makes sense. No, the framing shop is outside the city, do you think the shop you mentioned would be able to do this? Would be easier to work with soeone locally, but I think that they manufacture frames in bulk in the city here.
dorkofwindsor | 4 years and 4 months ago
for a door you should glue them (unless it is holding glass in) but the nails are basically just to hold while the glue dries. don’t ned many.
was that by chance the frame and moulding place in sunset park on 5th ave and 28th st?
hkapstein | 4 years and 4 months ago
First of all Steve, thank you for this offer to help. I’d love to work with you on a project, and I know you know what you’re doing, but it just feels like overkill having you trim out these doors. Do you have any interest in working on some old shutters?
Now I have made some progress on my door moulding project, and I think I can produce the result I’m looking for a good price, and still get everyone paid a fair rate!
It turns out that there is an industry that cuts and miters mouldings all day long at high efficiency in a shop, and that’s picture framing! I called a shop that makes bulk picture frames. A moulding cut to measure and mitered 45 degrees is apparently called a “chop”. Also available, a product called a “join” which is 4 mouldings nailed together to make a frame.
Oddly, no architectural moulding shop I spoke to seems to offer chops, but the first framing shop I was really helpful! The guy said he used to churn out thousands of frames a day, but had lost most of that business to China. However, he says with his setup, I could send him a cut list and he c ould produce it out in a few hours, with accuracy better than 1/16th of an inch, and I believe it. If he can make a frame I think this should be a breeze. He even offered to send a sample to make sure the fit is right.
With the mouldings cut to size, it appears we can get the mouldings attached with one day of labor, and it would not require as skilled a person to do the attachment.
Some questions are, should we nail or glue the mouldings? Nailing would require some extra work at the paint stage, but is probably easier on the install. Then, should we have the mouldings pre-joined? It makes the delivery more expensive, since they are much larger units. I feel like it doesn’t save a ton of time, but I suppose lining up the individual mouldings does take time and might not be as perfect. What do you think?