It’s truly a scary thing to pay the kind of money these doors no doubt cost, and then find out that the panels have split.

What to do? Replace the doors? No…you call around town and find out who it is that has a reputation for solving such problems.

Close-up shot to show some of the exquisite detail that makes these doors worth saving. Note the “raised-molding” that holds the panels in place.

This was “the key” to our being able to remove the panels for repair…the fact that the molding that stops-in the panels was removable…

…rather than the common type of stops that are simply a milled profile portion of the adjoining stiles and rails. In other words…non-removable.

The panels are removed at our high-tech shop in southwest Portland.

They are glued. They are clamped.

They are saved for many more years of providing a secure boundary and a dependable entryway to and from our client’s castle.

A modest home in Beaverton with a young family with young children making noise when “the-work-from-home-dad” is downstairs trying to work on his computer.

Not only is the door at the top of the stairs not very sound-proof, but it is also quite easy for young children to open it and possibly take a tumble or to go down and disturb their Daddy.

The former thing being completely unacceptable of course, while solutions to both criteria are being sought. So the new door that was to go here, as already stated, had several important criteria. No threshold to trip over when heading towards the stairs.

They wanted a full-blown 1 3/4″ thick exterior full-lite wood door with insulated glass, even though this was an interior opening. The point being to be able to see through the door…which was also a safety related issue.

They wanted to avoid hitting people in the hallway when opening the door. They wanted a hydraulic door-closer so the door would close and latch by itself every time, which was another safety measure.

To increase the sound-abatement qualities of this door assembly, the door jamb was ordered with Q-Lon weatherseals product for the top & sides, and the bottom of the door was outfitted with a Pemko 411ARL Mortise Automatic Door Bottom, or Auto-Drop as we call them.

And down the stairs near our client’s office was an exterior door to the backyard with a wood sill that had literally disintegrated. If you enlarge the photo, you can probably make-out the light showing at the bottom of the door. And this of course, is the “REPAIR” portion of this project.

And this is why. No sill. No threshold.

So we were contracted to build a quick & easy concrete-form into which to pour some Quikrete fast drying concrete mix. A pressure-treated wood sill…

…and then covered all that with a Pemko 327D Sill Nosing, a Pemko 154D 1/2″ X 5″ Commercial Aluminum Saddle Threshold and finished by weatherstripping the bottom of the door to the top of the threshold by means of the Pemko A372P 3/8″ Pile Weatherstrip routed into the bottom of the door.

The Irvington district. Lots and lots of history and Portland architectural character.

And nothing speaks of Portland’s character much better than its emphasis upon the world of art.
Remember, you can click on these photos to get a little better glimpse of some of the details.

Here we have a really delicate artistic expression in the form of a glass Heron. A little too delicate actually. Apparently, it’s been repaired more than several times before, and the home owner is tired of having to pay for its continual repair, or so it’s been reported to us.
Can you see the arched crack in the glass emanating from the Herons chest?

And in large part, the delicacy comes from the fact that we are dealing with single-pane glass, whereas so much of the commercial art-glass in doors these days comes sandwiched and protected by virtue of an insulated glass unit. Note the rope that is tacked to the door, which is the means by which the art-glass is glazed to the wood panel. Quaint!

Thus, every time this large heavy door is closed, there exists the possibility that inertia’s sudden arrest when hitting the strike-jamb will translate into the glass flexing and breaking. Here we are looking at the handiwork of Craig French. Master radius wood guy of Cascade Specialty Woodworking. See; www.radiuswoodguy.com

But it should be known, that before the glass was re-installed back into the door, that David Schlicker of David Schlicker Art Glass (www.davidschlicker.com) made the repairs to the original art work that had been damaged.

After which he proceeded to sandwich the art-glass between two panes of clear, tempered oval glass pieces and sealing the edges all around. So Craig French proceeded to use the dimensional information…

…related to thickness and shape of this new insulated glass assembly as it related to the thickness and shape of the original hole in the panel of the door and proceeded to manufacture the interior & exterior oval-shaped stop material by which this piece of art was reinstalled by our company.

Kudos to Craig French (Cascade Specialty Woodworking) and David Schlicker (David Schlicker Art Glass) for making our job so much easier by their being the experts and craftsmen they purport to be.

And kudos to Brandon Todd, our field technician who so ever skillfully finessed the re-installation of this delicate bird back into its perch!!!

Your proverbial Spanish villa in Tualatin.
Now you might find yourself thinking you saw this same project under “Door Installation,” and the honest truth is that you DID! The explanation is that the project was quite unique and we wanted to show it off a little bit. Problem solving extraordinaire!!! It’s what we do.

We don’t really have a garage door category, so here we are. Our client had a desire to seal-up the bottoms of his three sets of double “swing-type” garage doors, which are frequently referred to as carriage doors. And since this is not your stereotypical garage, in that it…

…incorporates living space as well as space for 3 of his cars, and we didn’t want to coat everything with sawdust, we set up a temporary covered shop to the exterior, which we are called upon to do on a fairly frequent basis working in the Willamette Valley as we do. And we’re pretty darn good at it.

Jared cuts the door bottoms slightly to even up the spacing between the door bottoms and the paver stones upon which our thresholds will sit.

David Castro then routes the bottom of the doors for the Pemko 369DP Pile weatherstripping product that will be installed to seat-up against the top of the thresholds when the doors are in the closed position.

The Pile Weatherstripping product is then installed after we seal the door bottoms.

Brandon goes about installing the Pemko 181DT aluminum thresholds under the three sets of double-entry doors. Anchoring them to the masonry surface.

We decided to augment this installation with a couple extra components. The two Oak filler-strips were installed to provide extra support for the thresholds, since there would be cars driving over them. The aluminum sheet metal piece allowed us to even-out how the threshold sat atop of the paver-stones.

As you should be able to make out in this close-up shot, we have created two separate points of weather-stripping contact. The pile in the bottom of the door seats-up against the top of the threshold. And second…the door bottom sits-up against the silicone bead weatherstripping in the bumper portion of the threshold.

Each set of double-doors were further sealed up by means of a Pemko 355DP Astragal that mounts to the strike-edge of one of each set of doors. This astragal incorporates a pile weatherstrip that seats up against the face of the second door when closed.
This was a fun job because it afforded us the opportunity to demonstrate our expertise in solving the problem of sealing up the bottoms of these doors, which our client had been struggling with for some time.

Northwest Portland, just east of Holman Park. Notice the lack of eves. We’ve been told that during World War 2, and for some time thereafter, a shortage of resources necessitated that architecture cut certain corners.

An absolutely gorgeous front door. The naturally finished wood is exquisitely contrasted against the green siding. But the door panels have begun to expand and contract…translating into splits in the panels and various joints & seams opening up.

And the back door is even considerably worse. As the sunshine in this photo indicates, we have a southerly exposure on this side of the house, which is where the lion’s share of moist weather comes from in this valley.

The large panel on this door has begun to warp and twist so much that it has resulted in some of the exterior wood-stops popping off the door. The nails shown here were apparently installed to help keep the panel in the door.

An interior view looking up towards the top of the panel shows the cupping panel pulled away from the interior wood stop material. You may get a better view if you click on the photo to enlarge it.

It may be hard to see from this exterior view, but the top horizontal piece of exterior wood-stop material is bent outward as it reaches the corner of the panel, and this is from the pressure being exerted against it by the panel.

This is what happened to several other pieces of the exterior stop material that have already come off.
If you enlarge the photo, you may be able to see the BOW outward of the panel’s far bottom corner, where the nail is installed.

And so it was that we were employed to attempt a remedy. We brought out our trailer and forced the panel back into position long enough for newly applied wood-glue & fasteners to establish a substantial hold upon it.

The prognosis? Not good. If the wood doors were painted on the exterior, then you would at least be able to caulk (seal) all the seams and joints by which moisture will otherwise most assuredly continue to gain access to the unfinished portions of the various wood components, no matter how many coats of varnish are applied.

But sometimes folks simply have not the ears to hear such things when they’ve already spent a considerable amount of money to achieve a particular look…which is, however unwise, stunningly beautiful…for another year or two.

Happy Valley. Just east of I-205 and just north of Johnson Creek Blvd., on the lower flanks of Mount Scott.

An alarm technician’s worst nightmare.
Unknowingly attempting to drill a hole through a fiberglass jamb with a spade-drill bit. Oops!

The solution? Order a replacement round-top Fiberglass door-jamb from the door manufacturer and hire the preeminent door-mechanics in town to replace the damaged one with the new one.

Not surprisingly, the new prefinished jamb from Jeld-Wen came with a new prefinished radius trim package in the crate with the jamb. If you click on the collage, and enlarge it, you’ll likely be able to make out the details better.

The door is temporarily removed by technicians Steve Hilt and Brandon Todd.

After which the jamb itself is removed…

…and laid on top of the replacement jamb for comparison and fine tuning.

Brandon is shown going about the task of reinstalling the replacement jamb, even while Steve is already re-hanging the door.

As good as new. Maybe better.

Another long day for the unsung heroes of our covert team of door operatives. Finishing just as the day gives way to darkness one more time over Southeast Portland.

A mortise-case lock can often be typified by those older locks that used the skeleton-keys, although there are many more modern versions now that don’t use skeleton-keys.

The springs in many of the older ones break over time, and of course many of the older ones have had plenty of time to break, such as 3 or 4 of them in this house. Note that the latch no longer protrudes from the lock case.

And replacement parts aren’t usually an economically viable option, given the time it might take to track them down, even if someone had some somewhere.

Hippo Hardware or Rejuvenation House Parts could potentially have something that might work, but most folks wouldn’t want to pay us to rummage through the expansive amount of boxes and drawers of old lock parts with no certainty of success. So we often propose to remove the old lock-case…

…and to cover the “mortise” (hole) with an aftermarket adapter plate made specifically for this modification.
There was some expert chiseling required on the edge of the door because the adapter-plate was longer, slightly wider and thicker than the original lock-case face-plate was.

And then we installed one these latches in each of the doors that are made for use with the old original square “spindle” or “shaft” that runs through the door from one handle to the other.
They still make these because there are some lock…

…companies like Baldwin who still makes locks that use the square spindles.
After painting the adapter-plate, you can hardly see it. This is a nice option when retaining the original handles and escutcheon-plates is a priority.

A very comfortable looking bungalow in the Hollywood district with an owner wanting to invest in its charm.

She had the original 42″ wide front door temporarily removed and sent to have it dipped so the decades of paint could…

…removed in hopes of restoring it to its previous glory as a naturally-finished wood door.

Unfortunately, the door was set outdoors leaning up against a wall after being dipped and was apparently…

…caught by a gust of wind and landed upon the pavement with enough force to not only break much of the glass…

But also causing some joints to come loose and cracking several of the doors structural wood components.

The company who stripped the door owned up to their responsibility for the…

…accident, the only question was “could the door be fixed?” Remember, you can click on these photos to enlarge and possibly gain a better view of what we are showing.

Not only did we fix the damage and replace the glass, but we trimmed & fit the…

…door for the best possible operation & weatherstrip in the original jamb assembly.

One of the numerous stately homes in West Linn.

A stately home, with stately Oak Doors, the lower panels of which have cracked, which you might be able to see better if you enlarge the photo.

This is not unusual for door panels made of solid-wood, which is why most wood door panels are made with a type of plywood with layers of alternate wood-grains running horizontally & vertically. Note the door with the panel already removed.

Our technician Brandon Todd goes about carefully cutting the overlapping stop-material with a Fein-Tool.

Three splits, four pieces X 2-panels.

So back at our shop, Jared & Brandon go about the task employing a Biscuit Joiner to achieve a realignment of the panel pieces.

This will help hold the pieces in place relative to each other while the glue dries, but the “Biscuits” will also add to the strength of the panels overall.

To learn more about what a Biscuit joiner is, go to; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biscuit joiner.

After the last piece is “joined” to the whole…the clamps are applied.

Shortly after this photo was taken, the excess glue is carefully wiped off, and the panels are now stronger than they would be if they had never cracked.

Northwest Heights, above and north of Forest Heights, just off of Skyline Boulevard.

This was a first for us. Never had we seen a stile & rail door seemingly falling apart under its own weight. The “lock-rail” and the “bottom-rail” on this 40″ X 97″ X 2 1/4″ hardwood round-top door had somehow sheared off their respective anchors (mortise & tendon?) at the hinge-stile and were succumbing to gravities pull.

This of course, was translating into the bottom-rail grinding down on top of the wood sill. If you enlarge the photo by clicking on it, you can see the rub-marks in the top photo. Imagine how heavy a door this size of door is, and you might be able to imagine how difficult it was to open & close this door before we fixed it.

Here’s a close-up shot of the lock-rail where it intersects with the hinge-stile.

This even closer “close-up” shows the “wood-stain-footprint” of where the lock-rail used to sit relative to the hinge-stile and reveals how far the rail has slid down.

7/16″ of an inch to be exact! So we temporarily boarded-up the opening & retrieved the door back to our shop.

Resourceful folks that we are, we employed the use of the overhead door opening in our masonry building to sandwich the door so as to JACK the DOOR-RAILS & PANELS back to their original position relative to the hinge-stile.

Steve Hilt is laughing in this re-installation photo (above) because we had asked for some “action-shots” showing our technicians engaged in the work. And of course the notion that one person might be able to lift this door into position really is quite funny because of how heavy this door is. Since Brandon was taking the photo, Steve was left to pose for the photo by himself.

In these two photos above, we are showing the dowelling-plugs that indicate where we drilled through the hinge-stile and re-secured the RAILS using some heavy-duty steel lag-bolts.

I believe we referred our client to Dan Rice (http://woodwindowstaining.com/) for touching up the wood door to remove some of the stains due to weather, and to blend-in our dowel-plugs and sanding marks. No more rubbing on the threshold.