Construction of 1900's Door Casing

Hi again,

In the end, we did buy a new custom pair of doors in the end, since we are also putting in a new wall and casing we felt a salvage piece would not look right.

It is ready for delivery but I have not seen it. We’ve got a new problem: our contractor has COVID and isn’t going to be available for a couple of months.

I am going to post the questions relating to the above situation separately.
Thank you for your help.

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”.

OP, so a couple more things. i reread some of what you said. you need 5 panel doors. i ordered one from Dykes ( a rouge valley door) in pine some years (10?) back. it was a nice paint grade door and we were able to stain it up well (even though it was pine) and match it to a period room. i cannot recall what we paid for it, but my thought was it was not cheap ($200) but was not overly pricey ($600). probably like $400.

something else i just thought of; using a mortiser, i can take an engineered wood door, mortise out two 1.25″x 6 or 8″ by 4″ deep pockets and using a maritime epoxy (this epoxy is always stronger than the wood) insert a solid piece of wood. the screws can be put to the solid wood and it will hold. i would not risk doing this on MDF though. the engineered “wood” or glued up shit is strong, it will just no hold screws, and it has a lot of surface for an epoxy to grab and lock into. i can even cut a channel in the wood insert and the epoxy can lock that in place with the surrounding stuff.

bob, you are talking about the retrofit w hich works other than the resulting damage i mention above, when the cable is left loose (they often run the cable near the gas lines and if they are hitting the doors, i tie them off to the gas line with wire ties). OP is scratch building this wall, so they can make it as wide as they like and build the wall out wider than the hardware by running firing strips (or heavier) wood up the sides of the kit (the kit has thin metal legs that the drywall is screwed to but there is nothing stopping op from building it out.

op, you do have options here to modify new doors to suit your purpose and i understand that the people on site may not be able to do such (it might take a shop).

steve
www.thetinkerswagon.com

This post made me take a close look at the pocket doors in my 1899 house. They all have the friction strips you describe [thank you, I didn’t know that term]. They’re all veneered with wood matching the adjoining room [i.e oak on one side, mahogany on the other]. Most have wall switches installed near them, mostly on both sides, so it obviously can be done. However, the elderly electrician who worked on my house in the ’70s claimed to have initially re-wired the house for the previous owner in 1938, which is when those wall switches were installed. I hope it’s not a lost art–probably not–there;s plenty of room for BX inside those pockets.

i know it is too late to tell you this, but part of being able to select contractors does not mean you have to know things. the trick is to invite them into a discussion and let them talk and get them to keep talking – if they do not know what they are talking about they will trip themselves up. after speaking with two or three or them, you will watch and listen to what they say. if you want to talk about pocket doors – one of them might know the names of the products off the top of his head – johnson and stanley for instance – and the others might not; that will tell you something. in this house, i had to source someone to redo the bathroom and i asked both contractors the same question – “will a standard size modern tub fit in that space?’. one person said “i will have to check” and when i heard that, i thought “how many bathrooms have you done?”. and when i asked the second contractor he looked at it and shook his head and said yes (he was correct and he got the job; i still do not know the length of a standard tub – that was his job; i wanted the job done with no hic ups whilst my better half was out of town).

back to what you are questioning about the doors you will need. MOST doors in the city – at least in Brownstone brooklyn are a thick veneer facing over a solid pine core. these are called stave doors and i get all sorts of people calling me telling me “i have solid oak or mohagany doors” and they are often suprised to learn otherwise. it is ok for you to look at veneer doors so long as the CORE is solid (and glued up staves count as solid) wood and not particble board or MDF or something they call “engineered” and i am still not sure what that means. From what i can tell with the Trustile, their top of the line door is solid, even if it is veneer faced; so long as that is indeed wood, not glued up waste, i would consider it to be “solid wood” even if the woods are not the same; keep in mind, the glues holding these together are often stronger than the wood itself (until they get wet). You need something to drive screws into to hold them to the hangers which is why you need solid wood, at least on the top rail.

there are several companies out there that make solid core, stave doors. Rouge Valley is one and they carry them at Dykes. on line there are some other manufacturers. i had ordered some doors from a company called Interior Doors Direct (in ohio) and they were solid core with a poplar facing on them and we were happy with them. I looked for them some months back and could not find them. Simpson Doors may make some nice fir doors though i usually go to them for exterior doors. and there is nothing wrong with using an exterior door; you can get a solid exterior door slab, cut for full glass (with no glass) and have it modified with panels and a lock or mid rail if you wish. we do that sometimes and a finish carpenter should be able to do that on site and something like this can easily be made to look period with the correct panel/glass molding.

I sometimes make doors but do not have the time now. Nate at South Slope can make them as can Vaugahn at Heights Wood.

even if your contractor has worked in modern style homes, he should be able to install the pocket door unit and hang the doors and close it all in after. if he can make a modern door frame, he can add traditional looking casement after the wall is up. stop molding, be it modern stop or something like a panel molding can go in last and no one will be wiser. he just has to leave some space and do not close the frame in to close to the doors, do that by applying the stop after.

this is not rocket science. it takes a little thinking and some planning but if he has done any wall framing and if he is a finish carpenter (not a painter or drywall hanger), he can easily make a door frame and trim it out and even if he does not assmble it the same way the did in 1880, with the trim on it, it should look the same.

Thank you again for your comments. No, we wanted the pocket doors as an essential part of our design right from the beginning. It appears he and I had very different mental images of a pocket door.

It is partly our inexperience that put us in this position, we should have asked more specific questions about what he knows how to build, we did check references. The photos we saw were more modern style homes.

Since writing, I have done more searches. I bought a few books very cheaply on Amazon on finish carpentry, and on the wonderful Internet Archive Building Technology Heritage Library, is an amazing catalog in book form called General Catalog, E.L. Roberts & Co. Sash Blinds Moldings Doors published in Chicago in 1908. Aside from wonderful large engravings of their products, including all sorts of doors, fret works (which they call grills), staircase parts, windows, moldings, store fronts (!) etc. there are diagrams of how the windows and doors are assembled. If you like these things you would be in hog heaven. I did not find a pocket door there, but I did have o ne of my questions answered by their glossary, the question about the thin strip around the perimeter of a pocket door. It is called a friction strip (duh-hh!) and it purpose was surely to protect the door faces from damage as it rolled back and forth. It isn’t present on all the old doors I’ve seen on eBay and in homes, but it seems very common.

There is a resource upstate that makes solid wood doors, very costly, which must be amazing, but I noticed this catalog sold mostly soft wood and veneered doors except for special orders. The explanation is that they didn’t warp. I looked at all the old doors on eBay and you can see the veneered door was very common in the last part of the 19th century/early 20th. The Tru Stile brand doors are also veneered even though they say solid wood.

If I find a good resource for assembling the door jamb and casings I will be back to share for sure.
Photo of a door from eBay for illustration. Its a lovely door but Im suspicious of the black stuff on it, could be fire damage.

[S-l1600-19](//muut.com/u/brownstoner/s2/:brownstoner:G9Wd:sl160019.jpg.jpg)

and op, after saying what i did about the willingness of contractors, it did dawn on me that maybe these pocket doors are someting that came into the picture later and the contractor had originally thought he was installing hinged (or no) doors. this guy should be willing to do the reaserch and if he is uncomfortable, he should have the integrity to tell you that and then you can work together. a customer asking for something unique or challenging is a great learning experience.

notice i assumed the contractor is a “he”; i know so by the resistance you are getting from him. i have hired women to do this work and not only do they grasp things faster but they are more willing to learn; they have had to learn to adapt in a field dominated by men and when they get into the field they excell much faster.

ok, i do not know a lot about trustyle. i see the name mentioned here but my thing is old stuff. Very rare i purchase a new door though i occassionally make new doors. i did take a look at truestyle doors for you. they make 3 types of construction; mdf, engineered wood, and solid wood. you need the solid wood. the screws will pull out of the mdf and engineered wood. a lot of the younger people out there, behind sales counters and even doing installs, might consider “engineered wood” real wood; it is not. they will sell a customer anything just to make the sale, so be careful. those real wood doors should be a lot more than the MDF or engineered.

I read what you said about the contractor and if he could not or did not understand what you are looking for and could not give the job “his all” and give you what you want, he should have bowed out. there is a polite way to say “that is not my thing”. and if he needed the work and did not want to bow out, he should have been more than willing to read about the products you are asking for and explain them to you (if he found he way into my house, i would tell him, you get the answers and i would check behind him). this is the “dumbing down” of the industry i have spoken about in other posts. a lot of people go into this work because they think it will be easy and then they find out it is not and they should be flipping burgers someplace.

This is such an amazing,, thorough response.
Thank you!

They are doing some noisy work here today but
I will write more later.

To answer a few points, no Masonite for us, we will probably have Custom doors from a company called TruStile. We have a Style with 5 Horizontal panels.

I looked carefully at some of our existing hinged doors. The way they were hung was that the surface of the door is flush with the wall on one side. The hinges are on this side. The casing bumps out around an inch on top of the wall. . On the reverse side is a strip of molding , a stop . The jamb is a 2×4 I guess, so the reverse side is recessed a little mire into the jamb Than the other. It’s an old house way of building I never saw in modern houses.

My contractor and architect are no help. They are good people but they are not knowledgeable about these details in an older house. Actually very few architects are — they want to make your home look like the interior of a depart ment store or a spaceship. No one wants to save the character of a building. They have no attachment to Brooklyn or old houses, no feel for it. It’s unfortunately up to me to make sure I have what I need.l to see.

and if you go with modern doors, do not let anyone sell you a masonite door for this. to top hang or be fitted with wheels at the bottom, they must be solid wood.

you can find a “shaker” door from a place like Rouge Valley Doors and have it fitted out with panel molding to make it look like it was made a century ago.

first, anyone passing themselves off as a contractor should be able to listen to what you are looking for, source some information on the product and tell you about it and how it will work for you and then they should listen to your concerns and either allay them or look for something else. they should also be able to locate the data sheets and info on how to install these. It is true that all of us have had a first for everything but by the time i did my first pocket door i knew who and what to ask before relying on the customer. consider that before you move any futher with this contractor.

if you are building this in an open space, you will frame a wall and fit the mounting hardware into the rough in. the companies that make this detail the necessary measurements. Look at the Johnson Door Hardware website. they have the literature there. if i were doing this, i would not try to do something like it was done years ago, but would rely on Johnson. their product comes as a basic kit and then can be added on to and modified for larger doors. we did s ome of this and had to contact their technical support team for help. any contractor should be able to make those phone calls and ask the support staff; this is not the job of the homeowner.

on the new stuff, the caseings will not be wider unless your person sets the pocket door hardware off center. i have noticed the old ones are off center and i never wondered why; they used to have gas lines run up the walls in there and perhaps that has something to do with it. which brings up the question about the switch plate. yes, a switch can be located there but one of the causes of damage and problems with the old doors is the retrifitted electric work which is not properly secured and the cable hangs out and rubs on the door.

the johnson kit is pretty much set up for certain width doors and when you want a double door as most brownstones have, you have to order and extension kit. i forget how much wider they are but you can do a couple of things, such as go with an even wider pair of doors and have them stick out a little or have them set back a little and use a pop out pull or have them flush. the space in the walls in many brownstones is wider and they have a stick stuck in the back of the door as a stop to keep it from going in too far.

yes, some of the door have that trim and even though i work on doors, i am not sure the purpose of it. what you might what is a pair of astragals to close the light gap between the two doors. you can also rabbett out one of the doors and put a lip on the other to create a seal between the doors. the strip of wood you talk about may be to keep the doors themselves from hitting the stop molding around the casing if they ever come off the (bottom mounted) track.

by the way, this can all be done bottom mounted as well. the stuff still exists. the top hanging Johnson (or Stanley) rolls much nicer.

i would not order doors from ebay just for the reasons you mention. also, finding them as big as most brownstones have may just be a little troublesome today. i would either look at doors at Demo Depot or BIG Reuse and see if you can find a matched pair.

also, some people who have less experience think they are doing something great by building the casing in very tight around the doors and the hardware. they should not do that. they should leave the casing back a little and a little high so that the rolling hardware shows a little at the top and then close that gap with stop molding. this way, when the rollers come off because THEY did not lock them and you call someone like me to fix them, i can remove the stop molding and rehang the door to the trolly and lock it and put the stop molding back without having to rip the casing off.

all this can be trimmed out to look like it is 100 years old.

All we do is doors.

Steve
www.thetinkerswagon.com