Wednesday, October 19, 2005

The House Project: Door Frames

Ever wondered how door frames work? Neither did I, but someone out there must be curious. First of all, there's the door frame itself, to which the door hinges attach. At least most of the time there's also some bric-a-brac that hides the ugliness of how the door frame attaches to the studs, and hides where floors meet walls. These moldings are called base (floor meets wall), case (along the right and left side of interior doors), and header (at the top of interior doors).

Okay, I'm a typical guy; I never look at these things when I buy a house. I don't particularly care, as long as they aren't incredibly obstrusive or grab my sleeve as walk in the door. My wife cares about these things (as wives often do), so we spent a lot of time at the moldings store, picking out exactly the right combination.

Anyway, our builder scratched his head when he started putting the case and headers onto doors and asking, "Is this right?" His fashion sense is ultratraditional, and so I had to run up to take some pictures and make sure that the molding store delivered the right stuff. They did--but you get a chance to see how all of this fits together in the building of a house.

Here you can see that there is a bit of space between the frame itself and the studs into which the frame is nailed--which the case and header moldings conceal.


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Here's a door with the case and header in place.


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Here's a closeup.


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We're going to have the case and header painted to match the doors, not the walls.

Here's one of the carpenters cutting the moldings to size on a miter saw.


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Oh yeah, I couldn't get away without a picture of the view from the family room! It's a little dark because of the brightness contrast, and that black out of focus object is a bug of some sort on the inside of the sliding door.


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Previous house entry.

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