Installing a Door Slab & a Glass Knob, Mortised Style LockSet

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Sadly not much has happened with my todo list. I mean — okay, maybe some little things, but my winter to do has pretty much slid headfirst into spring. And last week, the girls on spring break, I still wasn’t gonna get much done.  I knew it.

Anyways — if you happened to sneak a peek at my todo list back there, you might have noticed that I had a little bit of door stuff on it.  Last year, we (with the help of my wife’s other man) did two baths.  The door work, however, fell to me.  And why did it take so long? Part of the problem, you see, was our (in)ability to select an interior door for our “master” bath.

We finally decided on a single raised-panel door, in fir, ordered from our friends at National Lumber. This post covers (roughly) installing a door (slab), including the installation of a salvaged antique mortised-style lockset.  Its glass knobs matched the rest of the knobs in our 1889 farmhouse.  (It came from another door that I could not use.)

Hanging a Door Slab

Surprisingly, we have talked doors rather frequently around here.  And many folks, it seems (I can see through tracking our Google stats), come looking for information about hinge positioning.

So right to it:  from my experience and with a standard interior door, I find that a door’s top hinge, its top edge, sits usually at about 7″ to 7 1/2″ from the door opening’s top jamb.  A door’s bottom hinge, its bottom edge, is usually about 11″  to 11 1/2″ off the (finished) floor.  (For a great Guide to hinge number and “hinge height,” check this post from friend Ginny Powell >> All About Hinges.)

Couple things of note here.  1.) On routering for and setting the hinges in the door, I used Ryobi‘s Door Hinge Installation Kit.  While it has some nice features (like ease of set up), the lack of a positive stop on depth made me miss my old Porter Cable jig (which unfortunately has apparently one too many “loseable” parts, ha!).  2.)  You’ll notice that I used square hinges here and only two.  While it could be argued that you don’t need to “route” square hinges, I just think it is neater.  Square and only two because that’s how it is with the doors in the rest of the house.

What I forgot to cover here was the substantial planer work I had to do on the bottom half of the striker side of the door.  This old opening was that much out of square.

Oh! and you’ll notice we haven’t decided between paint or stain just yet.  I say Paint, but we’ll see.

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Installing a Mortise LockSet

With these vids, I obviously have some things I need to train myself on.  From this one below, and among other things, I need to remember to move my tripod to get the best angle (i.e. not shoot my back) – I get too busy working.  I often leave stuff in and show it as double time.  The hope is that even at double time, it’s useful.

In the video below, I spent most of the time on boring and setting the articulating unit of the mortise lock (the striker bits and any other technical name escapes me – help with a comment if you like).  I had previously uploaded vids covering Installing a Glass Door Knob & Installing a Strike Plate for it.

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My hope is to kick the work on my todo list into high gear.  This weekend I finally laid that buy-out VCT (Vinyl Composition Tile) in our pantry — black & white checkerboard. Oh and I will be sowing some grass seed.

That’s it.  If you decide to check the vids, maybe you’ll go ahead and Subscribe to the Building Moxie YouTube channel. That’s my story and thanks for reading. ~jb