**Installing a New Door**

One of the most significant projects you can undertake to improve your home's exterior is installing a new door. A well-installed door not only adds curb appeal but also provides a sense of security and functionality. In this article, we will walk you through the process of installing a new door, from preparation to finishing touches.

**Preparation is Key**

Before starting the installation process, it is essential to prepare the area around the existing door. This involves removing the old door, inspecting the surrounding area for any damage or rot, and cleaning the surface to ensure a smooth installation process. Typically, the old door will be removed by prying it off its hinges and taking out the screws that hold it in place. The surrounding area should be caulked to prevent water from seeping into the gap between the door and the frame.

**Shims and Hinges**

Once the old door is removed, shims can be placed around the hinge pins to adjust the door's alignment. This is crucial in ensuring that the new door fits properly and closes smoothly. Most doors come with longer screws for the hinges, which will help tighten and move the door into place more accurately. By adjusting the shims and using the longer screws, you can achieve a snug fit between the door and the frame.

**Adding Trim**

After the door is installed, trim needs to be added to cover any gaps or openings. This involves cutting the trim to size and applying it around the doorframe. It's essential to use high-quality trim that matches the existing style of the house. The trim should be applied with a putty knife to create a smooth, even surface.

**Caulking and Insulation**

Once the trim is in place, caulk can be applied to seal any gaps or openings. This is particularly important around the doorframe, where water can seep into the gap if not sealed properly. The type of caulk used should be suitable for windows and doors. Additionally, insulation should be installed on the outside of the door to prevent heat from escaping.

**Finishing Touches**

After caulking and insulating the door, finishing touches can be applied. This includes applying a bead of clear 100% silicone along the edge of the front of the stoop to seal any gaps or openings. Weatherstrippings should also be applied at the bottom corner and top corner of the door after painting it.

**Tips and Tricks**

There are several tips and tricks that can make the installation process easier and more efficient. One essential tool is a quick-dry, siliconized latex caulk, which can be used to fill larger holes or gaps around the doorframe. Plastic Wood, made by DAP, is an excellent product for filling nail holes without shrinking or shrinking too much. It's also paintable and comes in a natural wood color.

**Reveal**

The reveal refers to the gap between the trim and the doorframe. To determine the reveal, it's essential to put the trim on the hinge side first and press it against the hinges. Then, mark the reveal using a pencil or marker. The ideal reveal is about 3/8 of an inch, which is half of the jam.

**Concreting and Finishing**

If water has seeped into the gap between the concrete and the doorframe, it's essential to fill in the gaps with SikaPro Select Concrete Fix. This will prevent water from entering the house through the gap. Additionally, a clear bead of silicone can be applied along the edge of the concrete to seal any gaps or openings.

**Conclusion**

Installing a new door is a significant project that requires careful planning and execution. By following these steps and tips, you can ensure a smooth installation process and achieve a professional-looking finish. Remember to take your time, measure carefully, and use high-quality materials to get the best results for your home's exterior.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enSo today we’re going to show you how toinstall a front door, an exterior door, andspecifically a larger door with a sidelight.And we’re also going to show you how tosave $400 doing this, so keep watching andwe’ll show you the tips of how to installit and save money.So most likely, you’re replacing the frontdoor because it’s ugly and it needs to bechanged; the weather stripping might not beworking, or it’s just a builder-grade doorthat you want to put something fancier in.So first step is to always evaluate the sizeof the door. Typically, door sizes go withintwo inches from 28 inches all the way up to36 inches. Typically a front door, you’realways going to want a 36-inch door so youcan get appliances in and move your furniturein. You want to be able to get the largestopening in your house to bring everythingin.So this particular door is a 36-inch door.Now the sidelights, they typically come intwo-inch increments as well, and you can alwaysget something completely custom, but thatalways costs more money to do that. The standardsize is your 12 inches and 14 inches for sidelights.And this particular one is a 14-inch sidelight.Basically, measure the door and the sidelight– so 14 inches – and you add 3 inchesto that overall opening. So three inches.Thirty-six, fourteen is 50 inches. Plus threeis 53 inches. So to double-check that, we’lljust kind of go from our trim to trim. Sobasically, yeah, a 53-inch rough-in openingis what the door is. So when you look online,you’re going to be looking at the sidelightand the door size, and it’ll give you anoverall measurement of your rough-in size.So 53 inches. And typically you’re at 82inches for the height. The door is actually80 inches, and you have your jam above, makesit like basically 81 inches.First step is always to measure it to seewhat you want to put into that opening, andthen price always come into factor when you’reestablishing what you’re going to purchase.First step is to remove this front door. Ialways tell people you really want to makethis efficient. You don’t want to createmore work than is necessary. That’s onething about demo. Demo is an easy process,but you have to do certain things in a certainorder and prevent yourself from creating morework than you actually want to do.The first step is to remove the trim. Alwaysuse a utility knife. Typically, the painteralways caulks the edge of your trim, so youwant to cut that caulking joint so you don’tpeel off your drywall. If you just try topull this off right now, most likely I’dbe able to peel off all this paint, and Idon’t want to have to address any of that.Use your utility knife. Just score the edgesit doesn’t take a lot of pressure. Justenough just to cut that joint. And we’lldo it also on the top. And then the way we’regoing to be installing this door, we’regoing to show you how to save a lot of timeand headache from the outside basically nothaving to really recreate and finish the outside.But we’ll get to that later. But I justwant to mention that basically work on yourinside the door, taking it out first. Andthen we’ll preserve the outside and keepthat from getting damaged.This jam doesn’t really matter to me becauseobviously we’ll be replacing the door. SoI would always try to go from the front endof the door. You can obviously use a pry baras well. But avoid using the hammer on thedrywall side. If you start to wedge this,you’re going to indent your drywall, andyou’ll have to repair that as well. So tryto do all your prying on the door side ofthe trim here.We’re going to be putting some new trimon here, and I would advise using new trim.Trying to peel this off, it’s just goingto be very difficult to keep this nice andreusable.Okay, so then we’ll take out the door. Ijust have a little nail punch here; it helpstake out these hinges.So the next step, we’re going to try toget this sidelight out. And the way we’regoing to do this is going to be a little unconventional.But I’ll show you why this has to do withsaving that $400. My preference to do thatis just using a circular saw and cutting throughmy jam and a Sawzall to finish it off. Butreally you can pretty much, just as long asyou stay away from your metal plates, if youjust go right through the center here, you’llbe able to cut this in half and then pullthis apart. And then we’ll just use ourSawzall. This is the Diablo 9-inch demo blade.So I usually like to use a 9-inch becausethat’s usually most of the width I everneed to cut. Anything longer can easily bend.And anything shorter is kind of tough to do.I can already see that the builder decidednot to waterproof underneath this sill. That’susually a problematic area, so we’ll showyou how to do that properly a little bit lateron. But you definitely don’t want to havethis exposed wood below your sill.We’ll take out the quarter round basicallyencasing this sidelight.See they have this screw holding the doorin.We’re just replacing the door. We don’twant to paint the outside of our house. Usuallya common problem. I mean, we put in a newdoor. If you mess up your siding, this isa basically a composite-type material that’spainted; probably painted 15 years ago. Idon’t want to paint the whole outside ofthe house. So I’m going to try to basicallykeep my existing brick mold all around theopening so I don’t have to mess with theoutside. This will really make it a lot quickerfor me and create a lot less headache overtime. So what I’m going to be doing is leavingthese jams in place as they sit. Probablytake out the top header portion of this. SoI’m going to use an oscillating tool tocut the nails between this because I don’twant to damage this top brick mold that Ihave on there.So now that you that there’s no nails inthere, then I can pry this down and pull outthe header. Then I have screws here that wereholding in my old sidelight. I’m going toremove those. So we’ll remove the old hinges.And at this point, you might be wondering:Why am I taking out these hinges? Why am Ileaving this whole jam? We’ll show thata little bit further down the road. But thisis the way to save a little bit of money ona door like this by leaving this existingjam in here.Once you get your door out, a pretty importantstep that I think a lot of people will missis actually sealing the base below the door.This is always going to be, in some ways,the biggest problematic area. If water runsdown the door, goes around the sill, and getsin here, a lot of times you’ll see thisall rotten. This actually doesn’t look toobad. Main reason is we have a front porchthat is covering this front door, so it’sminimal amount of water coming to it. Youdon’t want to have exposed wood underneathyour sill. Most scenarios, you wouldn’tnecessarily have this concrete stoop comingup. The door would be basically a step intothe door or flush with whatever your patiois. They do make things called a jam sillthat’s basically a rubber sill that youput underneath the door. But since we havethis concrete stoop, we’re not going tobe able to use one of them because they’reprimarily made to wrap around the edge ofthe base. So we’re going to use this. It’scalled Building Tape by Protecto Wrap. Youuse this around doors or anything that youwant to seal. But this is going to make surethat we protect this wood below the sill.So make sure everything’s all clean, dust-freebefore we go installing it. And we’re justgoing to basically cover this whole area withthis wrap. Super sticky stuff. So I’m goingto overlap onto my concrete here. Do likesome side flashing here against my existingjam. And I just want to make sure that nothinggets in between these joints in the corner.Here’s our new front door. To reduce someweight at moving this thing around, we’llactually take the door off its hinges as well.These things have these little locking mechanismson the bottom of the hinges. So these go inhere. So you just have to pop these out sothen you’re able to get that hinge pin outof there.So this is a scenario where you’re goingto save $400. So we’re going to take offour brick mold. But the reason this saves$400 these sidelights, primarily come in stockat 12 inches, and the door that we just aretrying to replace had a 14-inch sidelight.I wanted to custom order this with a 14-inchsidelight, it would have been $400 more toput this door in. And to me, having a smaller– I mean you’re literally only talking2 inches – smaller opening, it’s not goingto make any difference as far as me gettinginto the house of the same size – it’sa 36-inch door – is just the sidelight.So we’re going to just use some additionaltrim work for the outside of the door andon the inside to make this smaller door workwithin its opening. That’s how you can save$400 is by using a more common-sized doorfor your opening. We’re taking the brickmolding off because we’re keeping our existingstuff there. We don’t want to have to repaintthe outside of the house and taking off allthat caulking and trim.So we’ll just knock this trim off; maybesave it for another project. Okay, and thenwe just grab our door. And we have to bringit inside the house first. And we’re goingto dry fit this first just to make sure thatwe’ll be able to fit it in the way thatwe want to. Looks like I got some drywallholding me up on the inside sticking down,so I have to cut that out. I got a littlebit of drywall hanging down below my framinghere.I’m going to pull this back out, just seeif I could get just a tiny bit of movementin that header. And I also want to get thisfoam board out of here too. Sometimes withrough-in framing, you can get a little bitof movement by just pounding up on it. SeeI just moved up an eighth of an inch there.So I’m just going to use a block; just poundon this header. So you have to kind of gagethings. If it seems to be getting tighteras you go in, it’s probably too tight, andyou have to do a little bit more adjustments.So we’ll adjust this header again.So sometimes you have to go out of the boxof what you think you would have to do toget some things to fit. So I really only needabout an eighth of an inch. For whatever reason,this jam is a little bit taller than whatthe existing one was, so I’m just goingto use a planer and plane down my top edgeof this. Just run a couple of passes withmy planer, and that should give me the thickness.Now, if this were the jam side, I’d probablybe reluctant to do that because the jam isreally what’s anchoring the door systemto everything. The header is not so much areally significant part. It’s not reallydoing anything structurally; not holding thedoor together. It’s basically just holdingweather stripping to seal the door. So I feelpretty comfortable reducing the size of thetop. On the sides, you want to be a littlebit careful because that is the structuralintegrity of the door.So this sidelight has a little bit of furtherextension in this additional trim piece. We’rejust going to use our oscillating tool. Sincewe got it dry fitted, we’re going to takethis back up because there’s one more importantstep before you actually install this jam.We’ll get into that next.That’s why it’s always important to dryfit this before you go putting silicone onthis sill. Again, the biggest area where you’regoing to end up with water damage is at thesill level, especially if water is hittingthis stoop and coming in. So we want to puta really generous bead of silicone. This isactually made by DAP; it’s Advanced SiliconizedSealant. So as long as you have basically100% waterproof sealant on here, you can feelcomfortable when you put in your sill. SoI’m going to put like basically two largecontinuous beads on my protector wrap here.I’ll just put one back here. All right,so then this will make sure that my thresholdis sealed down there so that if any watercomes in, it’ll be able to be avoided out.And actually, even after I install my jam,it might not be a bad idea to put in someclear silicone against the actual thresholdto the concrete.It’s always a good idea to just double-checkyour plumbness on here; it’s always a goodidea to just double-check that. And screwthat in.We’ll wind up boring some holes here andput screws to anchor this. And then reallythe only option we have is on the outsideframe here to adhere here because you basicallyjust have the edge of your sidelight rightup against your sill. So we’ll pilot drillsome holes here.So we’re going to predrill some holes hereto anchor this into our existing jam. Do aboutthree screws going all the way down. Now,I recommend using like a 3-inch deck screw.I personally like deck screws; they’re alreadycoated; they’re not going to rust. But atthe very minimum, use some kind of a galvanizedscrew or galvanized nail for that matter.So I personally like these screws that havethis little additional threads at the end,and this prevents it from basically splittingthe wood, and it also makes a nice, flushsurface to your wood. So when you sink itdown in, it just makes a nice, perfect littlerecess on it, and I can just fill that inwith some putty.We put our door back on, and we have a littlebit of an issue. There’s always kind oftypical when you’re installing a door – youalways have to shim or make things move toadjust the door. But right now we can’tevent close the door, and it looks like wehave to shim things this way in order forthe door to kind of move up slightly. So we’regoing to unscrew our screws here on the outside.So I thought it was going to be easy, butapparently, it looks like since my sill isso unlevel here, it’s causing problems formy door to close. And I can tell right nowthat my sill here is sitting way up on topof this stoop, and it’s sinking down overhere. So what I really need to do is to getthis to move back further so that this canset down a little bit farther down. So I’mgoing to have to pull the door out; we’llhave to re-silicone and make sure that everything’sgood there, and then basically try to getthis back further. So I’m going to unscrewthe door.To determine the problem of getting this tositting here nicely, it’s messing my tilework a little bit further extending in. SoI don’t know what happens or why this tileis a little bit further out, but it’s preventingme from sliding that door back. So I’m justgoing to slightly cut off some of this tileso that I can slide my door back further.The issue that we have here is not only thatthe sill’s a little uneven is that our existingjam is also unlevel as well. So we actuallyneed to kind of skew this over a quarter inchagainst here. So what I’m going to do iscontinue to take off the rest of what thisjam is here because it’s not going to matterbecause we’re actually going to put a littlepiece of trim on the outside. But what I needto do is to take this down so that I havea little bit of wiggle room to shim this andmake it straight for the door to close properly.Okay, so I’m going to make the top as tightto my jam as possible. And since it’s unevenlike that, I’m going to just move this tightto that corner. We use our level; make surethings are level. Fasten that tight to thatwall, and then use shims and make sure ourdoor closes.Okay, before shimming things, you just wantto basically make sure that you try to keepthe same reveal around all wedges of the door,obviously making sure that the door closes;looking at this seam going down here, makingsure that this looks equal. I already havethis tight against this jam. I can almostget a little bit more, but what I’ll endup doing is just getting a screw into thehinge that a little bit tighter so that Ican get my reveal.There’s way to adjust this without havingto adjust the frame anymore. What my situationhere was that my existing frame was prettyunlevel. Door jams were pretty unlevel tobegin with. And we just need to manipulatethis to make sure that the door seals tightly.The most important thing is sealing tightlytowards your weather stripping. Looking atthese reveals, making sure that they’reeven all the way around, is going to be keyto making sure that everything seals properlyagainst the weather seal.Okay, we’ll get some shims on that cornerhere and also at the bottom. I typically liketo put my shims kind of where the hinge isat because that’s where the door is actuallysupported on hanging.So you get a little slight adjustment outof there. Most doors will come with some longerscrews for the hinges, so that’ll help tightenand move this over a little bit more on thedoor side and make sure that it closes.So now we’ll just put basically a door stoptransition over here, but I want to try tosomewhat keep the reveal the same all theway along. Probably just split the difference.Okay, so we’ll caulk this trim in placebefore we start using some expanding foamon the inside. You just want to make surethat expanding foam isn’t coming out ofthis. I’m using a quick dry siliconizedlatex so I can paint the surface in the sameday.So on these bigger holes that you put thesescrews in, you don’t want to just use regularcaulking to fill that in. It’ll shrink,and it’ll end up looking pretty terrible.You’ll be able to see exactly where youput that screw hole. What I like to use itthis Plastic Wood made by DAP. It’s an excellentproduct, and it doesn’t shrink, and it’spaintable. Basically goes on pink, and it’llturn to like a natural wood color when it’sdry, so you’ll know when you can paint it.But definitely use this with a putty knife;this will make it look a lot nicer, and youreally only have to go over this one time,then you’ll be able to paint it. Otherwise,you’re going to see those nail holes, andit’ll look pretty terrible, in my opinion,on something this big. If you put a littletoo much on there, you can always sand thisdown before painting.Now we have the trim on the outside, we cango ahead and foam this. It’s really importantthat you buy foam insulation that’s madefor windows and doors. The reason this isimportant is because if you use a generalfoam, it can actually end up expanding tothe point where it ends up bowing in the jam.So now we’re going to finish the trim onthe inside. And the way we’re going to remedythis situation since we kept this – we havea smaller door and we kept those jams – we’reactually just going to use a wider trim thatkind of matches this existing colonial styletrim. It’s a 3 ½-inch wide trim, so it’llmatch fairly well with the rest of the househas.To determine my reveal, I always put my trimon the hinge side first, just basically pressingit right up against those hinges, and thenjust marking my reveal. And then this is basicallythe reveal that I want to continue all theway around the door. Because otherwise, ifyou try to start here, you might end up halfingthe notch around this if they’re too tight.But typically it’s about 3/8 of an inch;basically half of your jam is what you usuallyleave for a reveal. Let’s mark our reveal.We got 81 9/16.For some of the areas that we’re going topatch the concrete, we’re going to use SikaPro Select Concrete Fix. Basically just fillingthese areas. This is pretty important. Ifwater came down here, it can go straight intothe house essentially. We’re just goingto use this to basically fill in this gap.And another important thing I think is a goodidea is to use some clear 100% silicone andjust go along the edge of the front of thestoop. Main reason is if water hits this,you don’t want water coming back into thehouse. I’m not going to finger this becauseI don’t want to get more of it coming outonto the concrete. So just trying to keepa continuous nice bead against that concreteshould seal it.Then your packet will come with these extralittle weather strippings. And a lot of times,you want to put these at the bottom cornerand the top corner of your door after youpaint it. I can actually see a little bitof light right at that corner. They just gota little sticky back on it; pull that off,and put these up at these corners.So, wow! First impressions are everything.Putting in a new door really gives a greatfeel walking into your house. I hope thesetips helped you out, and I hope I saved youa little bit of money – that’s even better.Give us a thumbs up if you like this video.It’ll help out other people to find it,and we’ll see you in the next video. Thanks!\n"