Our client in Tigard…

…had an interior opening between the kitchen/family room area and the rest of the house.

Family room activities frequently translated into noise finding its way into the bedroom area. Sound abatement is something we get called upon to address quite frequently.
Both doors & windows.

Please note that with this particular application we were able to turn the existing wood surround material that already existed in the opening into a door jamb.

We were able to do this by means of providing & installing some applied stop-material to the original wood surround material, routing in mortises for the hinges & the strike-plate.

Original Door.

I assume most folks are familiar with the PANIC ROOM concept. There was a 2002 Jodie Foster movie about such a room.

Well this wasn’t to create a panic-room. But along those lines, our client wanted a significant amount of extra time should someone attempt an unwelcome entry into their bedroom at night.

You might note the extra shimming behind the strike-plate in the previous photo.
That…and these specially designed heavy duty strike-plates for the deadbolts…

…with the 3/8″ diameter, 3″ long rod that anchors through the thickest portion of the jamb and into the rough-opening stud…

…should translate into what is usually the weakest link in the chain becoming the strongest link.

Painting the Strike-Plates WHITE, to match the jamb made them dissapper.
In the almost 30 years of responding to damaged doors from burglaries, I have never seen one of these bull-dogs busted out.

You’ll notice that this door is prepped for three separate locking devices.

Two deadbolts & a keylock. And the keylock has what is often called a “Wrap-Around-Plate to add extra strength against it’s being damaged.

Notice how the there is no deadbolt cylinder to mess with on hallway side of the door.

Locks installed on the new door in the Master Bedroom.

Our client was looking to acquire some sound-abatement for the media room. Their hope was that we might do so without disturbing the original woodwork too much.

Taking careful measurements, we pre-sized & pre-machined everything so that we could bring everything already prefinished, so that when we were done with the installation, the job was complete. Prefinishing was by “Spray-Coat.”

We like to work 12 months out of the year, so if a garage or a porch covering isn’t available, we have a large trailer or some free-standing portable structures we can use. But if weather allows, we can set-up whatever shop we need in the driveway, sidewalk or even the street. You might click on the photo to enlarge it and better make-out the on-site shop we’re showcasing.

One of the keys to this job was using a custom wood transom sash, which we had manufactured, to fill the tall opening above the doors & sidelights.

Our less than subtle fasteners for the transom sash would be covered and hidden by the sidelight sash. And thus the sidelight sash would also provide a degree of further vertical support for the transom.

Making this addition look like something other than an afterthought required removal of some portions of the original woodwork…

…to allow us to cut and then reinstall them around the new products. The remaining seams between the new and original products we further defused by means of some inside corner moulding.

Foreseeing that some fine tuning would likely be needed to deal with the opening being slightly out-of-square, we waited to mortise the sash for hinges until we could ascertain whether or not the top & bottom of the doors needed to be trimmed.

We hung the doors directly to the sidelights, eliminating the need for additional jambs and hopefully making for a cleaner finished product.

Door stops were provided by means of applied material to the sidelight & transom sash faces on one side. Roller-catches and dummy handles made up the balance of hardware choices.

A modest home with a common need. Separation between adjoining rooms.

Sometimes it’s for noise abatement, sometimes it’s pet-control, and sometimes it’s wanting to secure a room.

For those in the building trades, an understandable question regarding these photos might be; “why the “on-site” pre-hanging”

The answer to that question lies in the fact that the floor beneath this particular interior opening had a severe slope to it, from side to side.

If you stick a “square door assembly” like this on-top of a sloping floor, you’re going to have to try and convince your client to live with doors…

…that open or close on their own because the hinge-jambs are leaning in proportion to the slope of the floor. Not very professional, but you might be surprised what we’ve seen done by others.

If it were an EXTERIOR opening, you would probably just shim up one side of the sill and threshold assembly and get by with that, depending upon the severity of the slope.

But the correct option for this INTERIOR opening with the hardwood floors was to cut the bottoms of the sidelights, the doors and the jambs…

…at an angle that countermands the slope of the floor, while maintaining jamb-legs that align straight up relative to gravity.

It’s a lot of extra work that some might not understand… but such are the unappreciated challenges of the journeyman door mechanic.

This project might technically fall under “new openings” as well, in that there is now a door opening that did not previously exist.

We’ve done a number of these type of door projects over the years. Installing doors between walls for a myriad of reasons from pet-control-barriers, to sound abatement as well as heating concerns.

This particular project pertained to our client’s desire to control her dogs when she was entertaining guests. Thus it is that we have this project featured in our Pet Related Projects Category as well.

Another original bungalow in S.W. Portland.

As is not uncommon, several of the original 5-panel doors had been replaced with inexpensive hollow-core doors over the years.

Even the jambs had been replaced. No longer maintaining sightlines or matching trim with the other original doors.

Remodeling the room for a soon coming newborn started the remodeling dominos.

But this client knew enough, and cared enough to let the pros order & install the new doors. This photo is showing the hardware which the client picked out at Rejuvenation House Parts.

The new doors, the jambs, the trim & the client-supplied hardware…

…with our installation expertise, returned two of the openings back to their original charm. The master bedroom…

…and the nursery.

A new homeowner in Northeast Portland wants to correct some previous remodeling foibles.

Such as this pocket door that leads to what is probably a previous breezeway between the house and the garage that has been walled in, but remains un-heated .

As you may or may not know, pocket doors do not make the greatest barriers between heated and un-heated spaces, so we open the wall, remove the pocket structure,…

…fill in with the requisite wall studs, insulation, re-seal the wall (drywall) and install a new door-jamb assembly.

The classic model 55 5-panel wood door with raised panels is the perfect match for this era of house.

An unusually thick interior wall translated into on on-site custom prehang project. This means that all the fine-tune sizing, beveling of the strike-edge, mortising for the hinges and boring for the locks were done on-site. What we call “one-by” (3/4″) material was used for the jambs as can be seen in the photo above, and then we simply applied some half-inch stock for stop-material.

Of particular note is the unusual panel configuration on this door, as well as the raised moulding around the panels, which is fairly unusual for an interior door, except of course for those stereotypical “McMansions.” This is not to say that the door is a particularly attractive door…that’s an eye of the beholder thing. But it is a bit unique. We show it in our “Door Idea Catalog.”