Ill-fitting, sticky, hard to operate, weathered wood church doors with water-damage to the bottom-rails. This was an old church in Oregon City.

The doors were removed, the openings boarded up, the veneer on the bottom-rails was repaired, the doors were trimmed and adjusted for best possible fit and…

…operation, kick-plates installed to provide a modicum of protection on those bottom-rails. And then we stripped and refinished the doors. Not necessarily in that order.

Wood doors finished naturally on the exterior can be stunning.

But as these photos attest to, even doors with substantial protection and shade…

…succumb to the destructive effects of ultraviolet-rays where the afternoon sun reaches the door bottoms.

So what’s a person to do… The answer is one of three solutions.

1. Only finish doors naturally that face due North. 2. Inspect your doors & touch them up annually or semi-annually.

3. Pay someone like us to come in every 8 to 10 years or so to perform major surgery.

Our technician Jon Benson applies his craft with finesse and expertise.

New Oak Veneer lay over where the damaged wood was removed.

Just one of the many door & window repair skills gleaned from decades of experience.

Portland City Hall. When the doors of the local power brokers aren’t working…who ya gonna call…

Sorry. Couldn’t resist the temptation.

Yeah, were talking about the main entry doors. Just like people, we get old enough and used enough, and we begin to perhaps sag a bit and not work quite like we used to.

As you can see from this close-up shot, the door on the right is a bit lower than the door on the left. This sagging was translating into the door bottom hitting the vertical-rod strike-plate, which was…

…keeping the door from closing all the way & the electromagnetic locks weren’t locking. Part of it had to do with the joints between the Stiles & the Rails beginning to separate.

So master craftsman, Bruce Hickenlooper goes about the task of injecting adhesive into the pertinent joints, and…

…then applying the necessary pressure via clamps to close those joints back up. And for a little insurance and back…

…up for the adhesive, holes are drilled and steel anchors inserted to span and reinforce these joints.

Jared, our senior technician then fills the holes with wood dowelling…

…and the dowelling is then sanded down flush with the edge of the door.

Grace Bible Church on S.W. 12th in downtown Portland. They have two sets of double-entry doors (4 doors total) with substantial fitting and weatherstripping issues. “Weatherstripping” is a…

…term that hadn’t likely yet been coined when these ornate doors were manufactured and installed. Numerous subsequent coats of paint & years of exposure to the weather can make for…

…extremely ill-fitting & operating doors. It might be noted that there are a number of folks who can install new door assemblies. Though tuning-up existing doors, there’s not so many.

So these doors are trimmed & fit to achieve optimum long-term problem-free functionality. All manner of damage such as divots, cracks & open joints are repaired by means of our hard-earned…

…expertise that has been decades in the making. The jambs are kerfed for a compression weatherstripping (Pemko S105D) product that we like to install for the top & outer-most sides of the doors.

After cutting the bottom of the door panels for proper clearance relative to the new thresholds we installed, Tony routes a mortise into the bottom of the doors for a Pemko Pile weatherstripping product (Model A372P)…

…that seats up against the top of the threshold when the doors are in the closed position. Here Tony nails the zinc-backed Pile with a specialized tool made specifically for applying a special weatherstripping brad.

Pemko’s 151D smooth-top … high commercial anodized-bronze aluminum threshold with chamfered edges should minimize the potential for folks tripping on their way down the stairs.

A very similar procedure, with the same Pile product, is employed down the strike-edge of the active door of each double-entry set of doors to seat-up against the inactive door when closed and thus seal-up between each set of double doors.

After all our cutting, trimming, planning and machining is finished, the doors are stripped and refinished by Mark Cole Painting, who came back after these photos were taken and also stripped and refinished the door-jamb & transom assemblies as well.

It is exceedingly rare to run into exterior bi-folding commercial doors.

For reasons of practicality, either out-swinging carriage doors or sliding barn-door style doors are much more common.

And of course the various types of roll-up overhead doors have taken the place of all of these for decades now.

Nonetheless, no matter how old or rare, if they need repair, adjustment and/or hardware replacement or upgrade, we can probably do it.

These particular doors needed to be adjusted up off the floor a bit…

…and the surface-mount throw-bolts replaced on the bottom of the doors.

In 1888 the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Portland, Oregon purchased 100 acres in the West Hills and established Mount Calvary Cemetery.

It is the second-oldest Catholic cemetery in Multnomah County, and was the third cemetery built in the West Hills – Wikipedia

Judging from the relatively good condition of the door and the severe exposure it is exposed to, not to mention the frequent weather conditions up on Skyline…

…Blvd., it is safe to say that this door is not 125 years old. Nonetheless, the single-pane zinc-camed glass lite in this out-swinging wood door is showing signs of the…

…weaknesses related to single-pane camed art-glass and also the realities related to out-swinging doors. As you may notice, a door is almost the size of a Cessna 150…

…airplane wing. Couple that to the infamous winds associated with Skyline Blvd., and it’s not hard to imagine how many times this door has been yanked from someone’s hand as they opened it up.

As the two previous photos suggest, there were a number of broken panes and broken soldering joints on this art-glass lite.
The photo above shows the length of new zinc caming…

…which David Schlicker Art-Glass replaced after we temporarily removed the lite from the door and delivered it to his shop at 4610 S.E. Division St..

See www.davidschlicker.com.
Upon David finishing the repairs, we picked it up, removed the temporary board we installed in it’s place and re-glazed it to the door.

Glazing glass and glass handling is one of the many peripheral door and window related skills that we’ve thankfully been given the opportunity to hone over the course of several decades.

This was truly a rarity. Flush veneer doors are generally among the least expensive of all exterior wood doors.

99.99% of the time, you’re going to be money ahead to replace them with new doors, rather than trying to repair them, when they look like this.

However, the original veneer was peeled off with such ease (this was key), that laminating new Oak Veneer onto the original doors was a snap.

We boarded up the opening, took the doors back to our shop, spread-on some super commercial polyurethane adhesive, laid the doors on top of each other…

…upon a smooth hard surface with a massive amount of added weight on top…waited a week or whatever, a little stain and varnish on one side each and they were probably better than new. Hard to believe, but true.

The Fordham Apartments Building on Southwest Vista Avenue just off West Burnside (Black & White Photo Circa 1950’s)…

…was finished in 1911, and assuming that the door is original, as it appeared to be…

…that would make it a 3’6″ X 7′ 3 3/4″ X 2 1/4″ 100+ Year Old Mahogany Door.

And she has been showing her mileage for some time now. If you click on these photos and enlarge them, you will better see the miles of which we speak.

As one might expect of a 100 year old oversized stile & rail door, the mortise & tendon joints were opening up causing the strike-side of the door to sag off of the hinge stile of the door. The brass kick-plate installed at the top, as shown in one of the above photos…

…as well as the wood plate across the top on the interior side were obviously an attempt to minimize the further effects of gravity. As you can see if you enlarge the photos, we were looking at a 3/4″ gap between the top of the door and the header-jamb near the strike edge. The Oak Threshold was apparently removed at some point to keep the door from hitting it and not locking. Security is always important in these buildings.

And so it was that we were contracted to rehabilitate this senior citizen of the door world. The top of the door was cut so that the gap was a consistent 3/4″ all the way across, and then the hinge-mortises on the hinge-jamb were modified to raise the door approx. 5/8″ to achieve a consistent 1/8″ reveal all the way across the top.

All the seams between the stiles and the rails were glued, clamped and then reinforced with lag-bolts (See box on the ground below the door) & then the holes plugged with doweling. The damaged exterior portion of the strike-stile below the lock was machined to allow the lamination of a new piece of Mahogany material.

The glass was replaced, the exterior raised-molding around the wood-panel and the glass was all replaced with new material. The wrap-plate around the lock was replaced with a new one. The plates across the top of the door (interior & exterior) were removed, and a new Oak Threshold was fabricated on-site to finish off the opening.

The jamb was weatherstripped with silicone compression weatherstripping along the top & sides, and pile weatherstripping was routed into the bottom of the door. An oil-rubbed-bronze kick-plate & a kick-down door hold-open was installed and the “piece de resistance” were Dan Rice’s stain matching and wood restoration services. See http://woodwindowstaining.com/.

Skirting the northern boundaries of Lake Oswego is the 645 acre Tryon Creek State Park, the nature center building of which was officially dedicated on July 1st, 1975.

The original two sets of 6′ X 8′ front and back double-entry wood doors are showing some of the mileage you might expect from 40 years of wear and tear. The photos will enlarge if you click on them.

Damaged sticking around the glass, myriad covers and footprints from previously used hardware and security bracketing have begun to make the doors look rather ratty.

Several attempts at various types of meeting-stile weather-stripping gasketing are contributing to the scares left by ill-advised weather-stripping products such as Pemko’s 369AP and 303DS. Neither of them had worked very well on these doors for various reasons we won’t go into here.

The FRONT doors, which are easily the most High-Traffic doors, are in need of (2) new LCN Hydraulic Door Closers. And a plan is hatched to replace these off-set door-pulls with more of an updated version with custom plates fabricated for us by Tice Industries in in N.E. Portland.

The purpose of the custom 24″ tall plates is cover some unsightly holes left from previous hardware. Above, we have Sean installing the new LCN 4041 Hydraulic Door closers. Steve is filling the mortises left from the Pemko 369AP weather-stripping that we removed, after which Mike sands it down flush with the edge of the door before it is painted.

Top left photo shows the newly plugged mortises on the edge of one of the doors. Top right photo shows the replacement stop material we installed to replace the damaged material. And the lower photos show Mike installing kick-plates and door-bottom brush-type sweeps.

This is nice shot of the new 24″ tall plates that covered up and cleaned up some previous damage. Also being shown is the Pemko 29324CP meeting-stile weather-stripping with screw covers. The “soft-brush” version is among the best meeting-stile weather-stripping we have found in over 30 years of trying various products.

Exterior & Interior shots of both sets of double-entry doors after Dan Rice painted them. See; http://woodwindowstaining.com/

The original 1975 doors restored to their former glory. The design is simple elegance, heavy with durability and functionality in a handsome earth-tone light green color and dark oil-rubbed bronze hardware accent. Fitting a State Park Structure, don’t you think?

The Old Navy store at Nyberg Woods in Tualatin Oregon.

An oversized merchandise-room hollow-metal steel door at the back of the store. These photos which our technicians took with their cell phones don’t always do an adequate job of documenting the issues at hand for the purposes of our portfolio here.

But if they did, you might be able to make-out the fact that the door is severely sagging and the top strike-edge of the door is hitting the strike-jamb which makes the door undependable for the purposes of security.

This has knocked the strike-jamb on this drywall hollow-metal steel jamb assembly loose as shown above. The bad-news is that the jamb miters are not welded, which has substantially contributed to the sagging issue. The good-news is that the…

…knocked-down door jamb makes removal of the jamb legs possible, so we could insert some additional structural support in the form of a 2X4 stud, which provides a form of shimming, as well as additional anchoring for our fasteners.

Augmentational custom brackets, shown here providing additional support for the strike-jamb on the store side of the opening.

A close-up shot shows how we aluminum-angle to fastened to both the steel strike-jamb-leg and to the adjoining stainless-steel wall protection plate.

It’s a rough looking bracket, but it’s fastened to the masonry-floor for substantive strength and it is on the storage-room side of the door opening where the flow of traffic, “both in and out” is least likely to stub it with their feet.

On the public-side of the door, we see here where we provided and installed a Markar B1923 Full Surface Reinforcing Pivot Hinge to further alleviate the propensity of this heavy door to sag away from the hinge-jamb side of the opening, for which these reinforcing hinges are designed.