Installing a New Front Door

Saturday we said goodbye to our old front door. We never really liked it but put off replacing it for a myriad of reasons. We bought a pre-hung unit from Lowe's (and, as a quick aside, I'll go ahead and mention that it took almost an hour to pick up the door due to incompetence on the part of a couple employees we had to deal with. They wouldn't listen to us and were completely confused by their own system and resorted to blaming other employees.).

Originally, I had planned on taking the pre-hung door off its hinges and just putting it in place of our existing door. I made a few measurements and realized this would involve a lot of custom cuts to place hinges in the right place and realign the holes in the jamb.

So I ran a razor blade along the edge of our door trim and slowly and carefully pried it up. Once it was gone we set to work finding "hidden" nails that held the old door frame against the wall studs.

We ended up breaking the old frame out, though theoretically you can get them out cleanly.

Once the door was out we cleared the opening of debris, patched some holes, and slid the new pre hung unit into place. It fit snugly but we had some trouble getting it to open easy. Sadly, we realized it needed adjustments only after screwing it into place in a few spots. After more fiddling we eventually got it to the point where it opened easily and shut evenly against the weatherstripping.