A-door-able

I feel victorious, more like I successfully fended off a pack of angry ferrets than like I finished a home improvement project. I keep wanting to pump my fist in the air and yell out inspiring slogans or something. The reason for this, my friends, is that we have a real actual for real door in the back of our house now. It has a handle on it and everything. I'm pretty sure it'll even keep the rain out, which is more than the previous door could manage. It is also seriously beautiful. A tear comes to my eye every time I see it. You'll see it soon, though, so you should probably get some tissue ready or something.

First, because I'm a big tease, here's my other project:

The paint on the front door is coming along beautifully. Sanding and then doing a coat with the foam brush instead of a roller helped a lot. I did another coat with the paint thinned with a little water and it's looking amazing!

You can just barely see the brush marks and only at an extreme angle in the perfect light. It's good enough for me, and that means it's probably good enough for everyone else.

So, I think the front of the door is all done, right? Apparently I'm wrong.

I tried to take the tape off the glass. I say tried, because I clearly failed at this relatively simple task. The paint stuck better to the tape than to the primer, and it started coming off in big chunks when I removed the tape. Ugh. Eventually, I just got it to this point:

It almost looks okay, actually. I'm sort of tempted to leave it that way just so I don't have to keep messing with this darn thing, but I doubt I will. I have this crazy idea that I'm tempted to try. Someone who knows better than I do, please let me know if I'm a big pile of crazy. I'm thinking of using chemical tape, as it were. My thought is that if i paint the edge of the glass with petroleum jelly, any drips or mistakes won't actually stick to the glass. Given that it's latex paint I don't think it's likely to stick too hard anyway (certainly nothing I can't scrape off), but I'm kind of tempted to try this out. If it works, it'll be so much easier to get nice clean lines than with tape and there shouldn't be any issue pulling the paint off when I go to remove the jelly. I will, of course, keep you informed as to how that goes.

Okay, now for the biggie. Put on your big-girl pants because this is going to be a long one.

This is the old door. You can see holes where a handle should be.

This is where the handle is supposed to be on the inside. Obviously, someone loved this door. Not in a healthy way, but more in a "I'm sorry baby, I don't mean to hit you I just get so mad sometimes" way.

This is gross. There's a bunch of grime in the door track and the space between the glass has been compromised so there's rust and junk between the panes. How you manage to get filth into a sealed space is beyond me, but I am no longer surprised by this sort of thing.

Now we get started on pulling this thing out of the house. It's like excising a tumor and some of the tools are similar. Caulk is sort of the glue that holds a house together, and if you want to take anything out of a house you pretty much have to cut through caulk to do it. On the outside of a house, caulk is your very best friend. Use all of it. Anywhere that you think water may even call long distance, cover it with caulk. Seal your house up tight, and you'll end up with a lot fewer problems.

Now, you use a pry bar to start working this out. You'll probably have to replace it. I know we did, because getting it out pretty much guarantees that you ruin it in the process. Someone else may be able to do it better, but we certainly couldn't. Also, this stuff is compressed fibers and the builder/previous owner didn't follow the rules about caulk so this stuff was pretty well swollen and rotted out.

Just keep working your way down until the whole thing comes off.

If you're luckier than me, you may not find this behind it. The piece just snapped off at the bottom when we tried to remove it, probably because it had been all wet and rotten for a long time. Unfortunately, there's not much we can do about this. You'll notice the concrete stairs on the left there, and those are pretty much locking everything in place. Short of tearing those out, tearing off the back of the house and replacing all of this, nothing we do is going to make it better. The best we can hope for is to replace the trim with new trim and then caulk the crap out of it to keep it dry back there so it doesn't get any worse. It sucks to just cover this up, but you have to pick your battles.

After a great deal of work, my dad and I managed to pry the broken piece of trim out of this hole. The moisture has caused it to expand, so it was a really tight fit and when you got a good grip on it you were more likely to just pull a piece off than to pull the thing out. Still, we got it out of there, which is good.

This is messy work.

Whoa, big change! Really, there isn't much to this part. A sliding glass door has a fin around the edge that gets covered up with the trim. Once the trim is out, you pop a few nails and the thing will just come right out. Now, here's something a bit strange. It is weird to have a big hole in your house. It makes it feel less like a house. It's really tough to describe the feeling, but it's seriously unsettling. You want to plug that hole up as quickly as you can and make your house a complete box again.

Who's that good-lookin' fella? That's a man who really wishes he had a door instead of a hole in his house. On with the show!

This is the new door. An important thing to remember when dealing with a sliding door is the nailing fin. Apparently some replacement doors don't come with them so you may not need to worry about it, but I have no earthly idea how you'd get it to stay in place without one. Either way, if there's a fin, there's a bottom fin. You do not want to rest the door on this if you can help it, because it will snap off really easily. We have a 2x2 board screwed to the fin so the weight is supported by the board against the bottom of the frame and not the fin.

Gross. If I could replace these things without turning this into a $10K project, I really would. I'm just going to put it back together as best I can and cover it in so much latex it won't know what hit it.

Of course, because the universe has a really childish sense of humor, it started raining on us while we still had a gaping wound in the back of the house. Joy.

OH MY GOD A RAINBOW ALL ACROSS THE SKY! Sorry, couldn't help myself.

Here's the deal. We have a hole in the house, it starts raining, and the new door doesn't fit. There's a hefty gap on one side on the inside of the house. We also can't get it to settle into the bottom properly, so there's no way we want to try to tack it into place. We bring the old door back just to close up the hole until we can get back to it.

We put up plastic to protect the OSB around the frame, and to keep any more water from getting where it shouldn't until we can get this stuff back where it belongs.

Bright new day, and a bright new attempt at installation.

Let me tell you about this thing. It's a brand new tool we went to get specifically for this project. Our handyman apparently swears by it, and even though we haven't been especially pleased with his work, the man knows his tools. My dad said that the window contractors they hired to come do repairs used the heck out of these, too. The blade, instead of rotating (think circular saw) or oscillating in and out (think jigsaw) just wiggles back and forth at crazy speeds. You can hook up a lot of different blades for different needs, and it comes with just about everything you could need for most anything (even a carbide blade for cutting cement backer board). This one was $130 at Lowe's and it saved us easily twice that in time and materials just on this one project. If you do work around your house at all, go get one of these. Seriously. I'll wait. All set? Let's continue.

Incidentally, hiring someone to install a sliding glass door for you: $400+, easily. Doing it yourself, even if you have to buy special tools and materials and all: Half that, and probably a lot less. This is why we do what we do. I can think of so many things I'd rather spend $250 on than paying someone else to do something I can do myself. This project, while frustrating, was actually very fun and rewarding. There's something so much more satisfying about a job you do yourself, I think. There's also the aggravation of trying to figure it out, the wasted materials when you screw up, and all the time you spend on it when you could be doing other things, but that's your trade-off.

Okay, here's the issue. See the depth of the opening along the top? That's how deep it was all the way around. The new door was about 1/4" too deep to fit into the same spot. See the nice clean line cut into the drywall on the bottom? That's the new tool. We weren't at all sure how were were going to cut that out. We were actually thinking we might need to tear out the whole thing and just re-build it later, but the tool, because of what it can do, allowed us to make the necessary adjustment. It's seriously amazing. I'm going to keep making over the thing, so just get ready to deal.

Here's me using the tool to cut the other side. We only needed to cut 1/4" off around the whole frame, which seems like such a small thing but it was keeping us from mounting the door at all.

You can also change the angle of the blade on here to make it easier to do stuff like cut 1/4" off the particle-board underlayment the previous owners put under the linoleum in the kitchen.

We had to hit Lowe's again and get some shimming material. A 1x3 along the top filled that gap nicely. The previous installers made the opening too tall so the top fin wasn't nailed to anything at all. We put this in so we wouldn't have to deal with the same thing.

Here's the gap on the inside of the house. It looks a little big right now, but once we get the door tightened down, it'll be much smaller. I don't think we're ending up with any gaps or cracks that can't be puttied and caulked. To me, that's a successful project.

There's the new door. It's so much prettier than the old door, I don't even really know how to describe it. Milgard makes a really nice door, for sure. We got the super-high efficiency glass on here, and the French-Door look as well. I couldn't be more pleased with it!

The nailing fin, with screws in every other hole. This is approximately 1000% more than the original installers did. I think they had, no exaggeration, about half a dozen nails holding this thing in place. We have probably 3-4 times that many attachment points, and we used screws into actual wood all the way around the door. We did have to do some more shimming to get everything to fit nice and tightly, but it wasn't too exciting. We got some lath from Lowe's (Not really lath, because that would've been cheap, but stain-grade pine for making lattices that cost $6 for an 8' stick. Ugh.) that's 1/4" thick so we could kind of shim everything and make it all fit. The door is square and opening is not. It took a little bit of creativity to get it to fit in there without giant gaps anywhere.

And because no job is complete without me screwing up somehow, here's my back yard. The old door was laying in the grass for most of the day and the sun coming through the glass just flat-out cooked the grass underneath. I'm really hoping this stuff bounces back pretty quickly.

So there you have it! We're going to be working on the exterior trim and the interior putty and caulk tonight to get this thing actually done for realsies. I'm so excited to finish this, because having it done really opens up a lot more possibilities for us. Now that the back door is in, we can do tile in the kitchen. Once we do tile in the kitchen, we can do hardwood in the rest of the main floor. Once we do that...we're pretty much done with that whole part of the house. It's a big step, and one that has been holding us up for a good long while. We still have a lot of other stuff to get done (front door, master bath, carpet, counter tops, back yard, etc.) but this is one huge item that gets checked off the list. Woot! That's all for now. Thanks for reading!