How To Install A Pre-Hung Exterior Door
How To Install A Pre-Hung Exterior Door – Adding Beauty To Your Home At An Affordable Price
If you have decided to replace the existing entrance with a new door unit, then the information I am going to provide in this article will be of great assistance to you.
Today it is easier than ever before to install a pre-hung exterior door unit. Notice, I did not say easy! In the days before pre-hung exterior doors, it took more time, more tools and specialized knowledge to install a door. Door units today can be purchased completely put together and so the term pre-hung was coined.
As a professional door and window installer with more than 20 years of experience, I have installed about every kind of exterior door unit made by most major manufacturers and have concluded that the process is much the same from manufacturer to manufacturer.
1. The first thing you need to do is evaluate the situation from the interior and exterior. Look at the existing exterior door appearance. Does the existing door frame have wood rot from years of rain or poor maintenance? When the door is in the closed position, is it air tight, or does it allow cold air to enter and warm air to escape? With the high cost of energy going higher every day this is a very important part of the equation regarding replacing or repairing the existing entrance.
Here is a tip, to get your correct frame size this is critical and needs to be correct. Carefully remove the existing interior trim around the door frame. After the trim is removed, with pen and paper in hand, measure the width, then measure the height from the under side of door sill to the top of the frame. This is your frame size. If this is new construction, you can use rough opening size; otherwise please save yourself a lot of aggravation and use frame size only. (more…)
