**Preparing to Install a Door**

So it could swing either for a left or right hand swing so what I always do once I get the pieces all out of the package is I just stand these two jams up and you know imagine in my mind walking into this room and I I look then and make sure okay yeah I got the knob on the right side hinges are swinging the right side this is the way for this room that this Jam would sit then I simply stand them together cuz those are the two faces I want stand them together and then I mark them right away while I'm still thinking of it so I Mark what room there for and then I I mark Mark the top on each one just so I can't hopefully get it too screwed up if I set them down and get sidetracked or something okay.

**Unpacking the Package**

Now in your package you're also going to have the the the header piece and the stop which uh you know we don't have to cut obviously because we're not changing the width and the side stops which we will cut to length so so that's everything that you're going to find in that package. This is what I find when I unpack my door hardware pieces.

**Cutting the Door**

Really simply the best thing to do is especially in my case because I was cutting off some off the top and some off the bottom I want to cut those exact same amounts off the top and off the bottom identical to what I did on the door otherwise your hinge and your and your uh latch your your knob area are not going to line up again you're going to get this all in there and and the door just isn't going to fit into it. So I've already pre-marked that out on mine so because I knew what I you know had to cut off the top of the door I've got to cut that exactly off here same thing on the bottom now i' simply just cut it on this saw I I don't think I need to show you how to use this miter saw so uh simply mark them both out cut them on the saw okay as easy as that. So I'm going to set those to the side.

**Cutting the Header and Stop**

Same thing on here now this obviously doesn't matter you just need to cut the same total amount off that you cut off the door so I just simply have that marked from one end the total amount I think was 7 and 58 or something like that and same idea I just simply cut it on the miter saw and those are cut to length and ready to go. That's pretty much all there is to cutting these parts, you can just follow these steps.

**Using the Header Piece**

That stuff's pretty easy like I said I don't have to do anything with the the header jam and the header stop those are good to go um that pretty much wraps things up one thing I do want to touch on though if you're doing a buold door which is very common as well for me to do here is a a sample of a bfold section that I cut off doesn't matter if it's the top or the bottom it's always going to have a hole in it cuz that's where uh part of the hardware goes so as you SE me cut those other the other door there and I slid in that piece glued it in clamped it in once that's all dry or even ahead of time of gluing in I want to make sure I drill that hole back in that piece that I've added in the top of the door otherwise I'm going to get it on site and it's not going to you know I'm going to have to drill it there or whatever so I just simply make the me take the measurements right off the existing piece that I uh cut cut off and uh you should have no problems and that's uh I think that's generally a 716 hole but just measure it and and be sure for your Hardware.

**Final Tips**

I just wanted to mention that cuz uh it's it won't be that uncommon to cut a by a fold door as well I don't think there's anything else I can blabber on about on this topic so I think we've covered basically everything that was there. So, the next time you're cutting a door, just follow these steps and you'll have your new door installed in no time.

**What's Next?**

Like I always say it's great if you guys like the video you like what we're doing here click the little thumbs up icon for us um you can follow us on Facebook Twitter uh come over to patreon and have a scan around there see if you might want to leave me a little tip and uh and uh just in general uh make a comment on the video I I try to read all the comments I don't always respond to all the comments but uh you know make your comment there if you do have a question though about this or anything else go to The Forum for sure go to The Forum post your question up there you get a response every time to your question.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhi I'm Shannon from house improvements.com and in today's video I'm going to show you something that I do very often in in different Renovations that I do and that is to adjust the height or cut off the height of a interior door as you can see here just as an example we've got the door just as it comes right out of the package this is a what I always refer to as a prehung door it's been preh hinged the jam pieces everything comes you know basically ready to assemble um and then over to the far side to the to your left your right I guess what you'll see is what I actually want to end up with for the particular situation I have it's not really ideal it looks a little goofy but sometimes you know you're you're just limited to whatever uh space you've kind of got to do so one thing you need to obviously consider is uh also what style of door you have obviously if this was just a flat slab door you know it would probably look better but it would also make things a little bit easier but the main thing to consider when you're when you're using a door that's already pre-drilled as you can see the knob uh height here so we're kind of limited I had to had to cut will have to cut some off the top and the bottom in order otherwise I'll just get this knob hole being way too low I mean it's already getting low as it is if I was to cut the full amount off I wanted to cut off the very bottom only the knob hole would have been like way down here I mean well you can see me reaching down to show you how low it is right now it's still at a decent height where you're not stooping too much the average person in order to reach it so um yeah so basically these are holoc cor doors so I'm going to go through the whole process cutting the top and the bottom in this case off and uh reinserting a solid piece of uh material back into the ends uh so that the door is still solid so we're just going to have to move a few things around here and get set up and then we'll show you how I do it okay so we've uh just brought the door over to a solid surface to work on and uh the way I'm going to demonstrate is by using your circular saw and basically a straight edge or a guide in order to cut the door off um just because that's what most diyers are going to have you're going to have a circular saw so you could use a table saw if you wanted to that sort of thing but uh this is a little safer so uh obviously you're going to figure out exactly what you needed for door height uh I've already done that I'm I'm there's no point in me telling you any actual numbers because uh yours is more than likely going to be different so so once you decide and and I think I already mentioned that I'm cutting some off the top and bottom so we're making a couple cuts here so I I've got this I do this quite often and sometimes I do it right on site so I've just got this guide made up in fact I'll just take a second to kind of show you here so the guides made up to to fit my saw so this bottom piece just protects the door so if it is a painted door or something I'm not scratching it with the saw the saw will actually run on that part of the guide and up against this this Edge to keep me straight right and if you can see underneath here this Edge is cut to the same exact measurement as my blade is away from that guide so once I mark my door I just simply line those marks up with the edge of this clamp it in place and I know what's going to be right okay so excuse me I'm going to mark my door here on the two edges obviously I don't have any hardware or anything like that on the door if you for some reason had the hinges on you may have to actually take the hinge off because it would likely be in the way for the guide depending what you're using you could just clamp down a piece of 2x4 as well so I've just marked or lined this edge up with my mark I'll do the same thing over here on and like I said that's why I like this jig because I know that my blade this is going to be the edge of my cut so it's easy to line everything up I've got my safety glasses in place um now if you were using a you know um some kind of wood near door what you might actually want to do because your your skill saw the blade is is turning upwards and it could tear out the grain or rip it a little bit on this side so if you're doing a a veneer door you might want to just take a utility knife and score right across there first couple times that'll just cut that veneer so it doesn't tear in this case this is just an MDF panel door M KN so okay so pretty easy here you can see the kind of the construction of the door right uh most of these are going to have some kind of cardboard reinforcement on the inside uh this one has MDF on the on the two ends or the two sides and the end so we will have to I'll I'll turn the door here basically this is garbage now I've tried in the past uh years ago you know trying to cut this down and reuse this piece it's just not worth it I just cut a new piece of MDF and uh slip it in there so I'll just remove this guide move a couple things out of the way and I'll spin the door so you can see the end so here you can see the end of the door that is now exposed so what'll happen is once I get my MDF piece cut I've got to measure obviously from here to here I've already got it pre-cut for this distance so that's easy enough for you to figure out and cut it this bit of cardboard that's in the way just push it back down for the thickness of whatever material you're using important to remember also like our door is embossed here it's got this raised panel type look you don't want to cut too close to anything like that because on the inside here there can be some protrusions it's not going to allow you to fill it in so you know I always try to stay about an inch away plus it just looks a little better if you can that way so I've got to cut this other end off in my case because there's such an extreme uh difference that I'm needing so I knew what I needed to cut off that end and I know what I need for a total height so I'm going to mark that and basically just do the exact same thing again so this is just a little bit of repetitive from what you just seen me do and then we'll get into uh reinserting our piece that we need in the end like I said this is something I do on lots of Renovations you're dealing with houses with low ceilings or bulkheads that might have doorways underneath that sort of thing okay so I'll cut this off okay and I'm done with the guide so I'll just get it out of the way okay so uh once you've cut that off usually there's some dust and stuff inside the door so I just make sure I stand it up and shake out some of that whatever's in there and I guess I'll turn it this way so you can see a little bit better what I'm doing so I'm just going to like I said I've got this these pieces here it's just something I every now and again I get some scrap uh 3/4 or 5/8 MDF so I'll cut a few strips and I have them kicking around for exactly this project sorry this type of project and so I just basically I really just need this to fit from there to there so I'll just mark it cut it on the miter saw ah disaster double check that it's going to fit yep and to replace that piece in there all you need is two or three clamps the piece we just cut some glue and uh I like to use a couple pieces of uh scrap material just for clamping on and what I'll do is I try to put a big just clean some dust out of here try to put a nice big bead of glue first of all inside here just right at the edge of the opening I try to keep it near the edge because when I slip this piece in there it kind of wants to push that glue in so if I get it in there too far uh you're probably not getting a lot of contact and same idea here but on the Leading Edge of the top of this piece I want to get a bit of glue there and for the exact same princip ible because as I slide it in there it's going to kind of the top of the door just going to kind of push it over and and we're going to get a nice even distribution of glue okay so I push it in and really it doesn't matter if this is in just a little bit past flush it's sometimes hard to get it perfect you can see I've got it nice in the middle it's pushed in a little bit here it's not really worth messing around with too much cuz nobody's going to ever see it I just don't like that piece projecting so if anything I like it set in just a little bit so it's pretty good where it is there right now these pieces I just uh place on the top and bottom of the door so I'm getting better pressure across the panel of the door instead of just at the exact position of the clamp so I'll put those three clamps on squeeze them up just simply wipe off that excess so it's not dripping everywhere like so okay so basically I do that to both ends of the door now let it sit uh whatever your glue is recommended I usually let it sit you know for the afternoon or overnight uh when it's when I'm satisfied that it's the glue is dry then I'll pull the clamps off the supports and I'll just simply take a sanding block and uh sand these Corners just slightly you know so they just starting to Sharp corner and uh as always this door is obviously isn't painted but if this door was already painted and I was just cutting it down uh you want to make sure you get these ends these Fresh Cuts primed or painted uh to keep your door from warping so so uh I don't think it's I don't think I really need to show you the other end but basically I'm going to do the exact same thing to fill it in uh the next thing we're going to deal with is the uh jams and the door stops okay so as far as the frames go like I said these doors all come mached for the hinges the the knobs that sort of thing uh this particular brand this hinge side is reversible doesn't matter which ends up or down the hinges are spaced out to work out exactly the same for the uh knob side because the the knob is always towards the bottom section of the door not it's not in the center of the door this side is made reversable so it could swing either for a left or right hand swing so what I always do once I get the pieces all out of the package is I just stand these two jams up and you know imagine in my mind walking into this room and I I look then and make sure okay yeah I got the knob on the right side hinges are swinging the right side this is the way for this room that this Jam would sit then I simply stand them together cuz those are the two faces I want stand them together and then I mark them right away while I'm still thinking of it so I Mark what room there for and then I I mark Mark the top on each one just so I can't hopefully get it too screwed up if I set them down and get sidetracked or something okay so so I start out with that um now in your package you're also going to have the the the header piece and the stop which uh you know we don't have to cut obviously because we're not changing the width and the side stops which we will cut to length so so that's everything that you're going to find in that package so moving on uh really simply the best thing to do is especially in my case because I was cutting off some off the top and some off the bottom I want to cut those exact same amounts off the top and off the bottom identical to what I did on the door otherwise your hinge and your and your uh latch your your knob area are not going to line up again you're going to get this all in there and and the door just isn't going to fit into it okay so I've already pre-marked that out on mine so because I knew what I you know had to cut off the top of the door I've got to cut that exactly off here same thing on the bottom now i' simply just cut it on this saw I I don't think I need to show you how to use this miter saw so uh simply mark them both out cut them on the saw okay as easy as that so I'm going to set those to the side so same thing on here now this obviously doesn't matter you just need to cut the same total amount off that you cut off the door so I just simply have that marked from one end the total amount I think was 7 and 58 or something like that and same idea I just simply cut it on the miter saw and those are cut to length and ready to go so that stuff's pretty easy like I said I don't have to do anything with the the header jam and the header stop those are good to go um that pretty much wraps things up one thing I do want to touch on though if you're doing a buold door which is very common as well for me to do here is a a sample of a bfold section that I cut off doesn't matter if it's the top or the bottom it's always going to have a hole in it cuz that's where uh part of the hardware goes so as you SE me cut those other the other door there and I slid in that piece glued it in clamped it in once that's all dry or even ahead of time of gluing in I want to make sure I drill that hole back in that piece that I've added in the top of the door otherwise I'm going to get it on site and it's not going to you know I'm going to have to drill it there or whatever so I just simply make the me take the measurements right off the existing piece that I uh cut cut off and uh you should have no problems and that's uh I think that's generally a 716 hole but just measure it and and be sure for your Hardware okay so I just wanted to mention that cuz uh it's it won't be that uncommon to cut a by a fold door as well I don't think there's anything else I can blabber on about on this topic so I think we've covered basically everything that was there so uh like I always say it's great if you guys like the video you like what we're doing here click the little thumbs up icon for us um you can follow us on Facebook Twitter uh come over to patreon and have a scan around there see if you might want to leave me a little tip and uh and uh just in general uh make a comment on the video I I try to read all the comments I don't always respond to all the comments but uh you know make your comment there if you do have a question though about this or anything else go to The Forum for sure go to The Forum post your question up there you get a response every time to your question on the Forum so so uh anyways uh what's your project today was it cutting down a door hopefully that what I just showed you will help you out thanks againhi I'm Shannon from house improvements.com and in today's video I'm going to show you something that I do very often in in different Renovations that I do and that is to adjust the height or cut off the height of a interior door as you can see here just as an example we've got the door just as it comes right out of the package this is a what I always refer to as a prehung door it's been preh hinged the jam pieces everything comes you know basically ready to assemble um and then over to the far side to the to your left your right I guess what you'll see is what I actually want to end up with for the particular situation I have it's not really ideal it looks a little goofy but sometimes you know you're you're just limited to whatever uh space you've kind of got to do so one thing you need to obviously consider is uh also what style of door you have obviously if this was just a flat slab door you know it would probably look better but it would also make things a little bit easier but the main thing to consider when you're when you're using a door that's already pre-drilled as you can see the knob uh height here so we're kind of limited I had to had to cut will have to cut some off the top and the bottom in order otherwise I'll just get this knob hole being way too low I mean it's already getting low as it is if I was to cut the full amount off I wanted to cut off the very bottom only the knob hole would have been like way down here I mean well you can see me reaching down to show you how low it is right now it's still at a decent height where you're not stooping too much the average person in order to reach it so um yeah so basically these are holoc cor doors so I'm going to go through the whole process cutting the top and the bottom in this case off and uh reinserting a solid piece of uh material back into the ends uh so that the door is still solid so we're just going to have to move a few things around here and get set up and then we'll show you how I do it okay so we've uh just brought the door over to a solid surface to work on and uh the way I'm going to demonstrate is by using your circular saw and basically a straight edge or a guide in order to cut the door off um just because that's what most diyers are going to have you're going to have a circular saw so you could use a table saw if you wanted to that sort of thing but uh this is a little safer so uh obviously you're going to figure out exactly what you needed for door height uh I've already done that I'm I'm there's no point in me telling you any actual numbers because uh yours is more than likely going to be different so so once you decide and and I think I already mentioned that I'm cutting some off the top and bottom so we're making a couple cuts here so I I've got this I do this quite often and sometimes I do it right on site so I've just got this guide made up in fact I'll just take a second to kind of show you here so the guides made up to to fit my saw so this bottom piece just protects the door so if it is a painted door or something I'm not scratching it with the saw the saw will actually run on that part of the guide and up against this this Edge to keep me straight right and if you can see underneath here this Edge is cut to the same exact measurement as my blade is away from that guide so once I mark my door I just simply line those marks up with the edge of this clamp it in place and I know what's going to be right okay so excuse me I'm going to mark my door here on the two edges obviously I don't have any hardware or anything like that on the door if you for some reason had the hinges on you may have to actually take the hinge off because it would likely be in the way for the guide depending what you're using you could just clamp down a piece of 2x4 as well so I've just marked or lined this edge up with my mark I'll do the same thing over here on and like I said that's why I like this jig because I know that my blade this is going to be the edge of my cut so it's easy to line everything up I've got my safety glasses in place um now if you were using a you know um some kind of wood near door what you might actually want to do because your your skill saw the blade is is turning upwards and it could tear out the grain or rip it a little bit on this side so if you're doing a a veneer door you might want to just take a utility knife and score right across there first couple times that'll just cut that veneer so it doesn't tear in this case this is just an MDF panel door M KN so okay so pretty easy here you can see the kind of the construction of the door right uh most of these are going to have some kind of cardboard reinforcement on the inside uh this one has MDF on the on the two ends or the two sides and the end so we will have to I'll I'll turn the door here basically this is garbage now I've tried in the past uh years ago you know trying to cut this down and reuse this piece it's just not worth it I just cut a new piece of MDF and uh slip it in there so I'll just remove this guide move a couple things out of the way and I'll spin the door so you can see the end so here you can see the end of the door that is now exposed so what'll happen is once I get my MDF piece cut I've got to measure obviously from here to here I've already got it pre-cut for this distance so that's easy enough for you to figure out and cut it this bit of cardboard that's in the way just push it back down for the thickness of whatever material you're using important to remember also like our door is embossed here it's got this raised panel type look you don't want to cut too close to anything like that because on the inside here there can be some protrusions it's not going to allow you to fill it in so you know I always try to stay about an inch away plus it just looks a little better if you can that way so I've got to cut this other end off in my case because there's such an extreme uh difference that I'm needing so I knew what I needed to cut off that end and I know what I need for a total height so I'm going to mark that and basically just do the exact same thing again so this is just a little bit of repetitive from what you just seen me do and then we'll get into uh reinserting our piece that we need in the end like I said this is something I do on lots of Renovations you're dealing with houses with low ceilings or bulkheads that might have doorways underneath that sort of thing okay so I'll cut this off okay and I'm done with the guide so I'll just get it out of the way okay so uh once you've cut that off usually there's some dust and stuff inside the door so I just make sure I stand it up and shake out some of that whatever's in there and I guess I'll turn it this way so you can see a little bit better what I'm doing so I'm just going to like I said I've got this these pieces here it's just something I every now and again I get some scrap uh 3/4 or 5/8 MDF so I'll cut a few strips and I have them kicking around for exactly this project sorry this type of project and so I just basically I really just need this to fit from there to there so I'll just mark it cut it on the miter saw ah disaster double check that it's going to fit yep and to replace that piece in there all you need is two or three clamps the piece we just cut some glue and uh I like to use a couple pieces of uh scrap material just for clamping on and what I'll do is I try to put a big just clean some dust out of here try to put a nice big bead of glue first of all inside here just right at the edge of the opening I try to keep it near the edge because when I slip this piece in there it kind of wants to push that glue in so if I get it in there too far uh you're probably not getting a lot of contact and same idea here but on the Leading Edge of the top of this piece I want to get a bit of glue there and for the exact same princip ible because as I slide it in there it's going to kind of the top of the door just going to kind of push it over and and we're going to get a nice even distribution of glue okay so I push it in and really it doesn't matter if this is in just a little bit past flush it's sometimes hard to get it perfect you can see I've got it nice in the middle it's pushed in a little bit here it's not really worth messing around with too much cuz nobody's going to ever see it I just don't like that piece projecting so if anything I like it set in just a little bit so it's pretty good where it is there right now these pieces I just uh place on the top and bottom of the door so I'm getting better pressure across the panel of the door instead of just at the exact position of the clamp so I'll put those three clamps on squeeze them up just simply wipe off that excess so it's not dripping everywhere like so okay so basically I do that to both ends of the door now let it sit uh whatever your glue is recommended I usually let it sit you know for the afternoon or overnight uh when it's when I'm satisfied that it's the glue is dry then I'll pull the clamps off the supports and I'll just simply take a sanding block and uh sand these Corners just slightly you know so they just starting to Sharp corner and uh as always this door is obviously isn't painted but if this door was already painted and I was just cutting it down uh you want to make sure you get these ends these Fresh Cuts primed or painted uh to keep your door from warping so so uh I don't think it's I don't think I really need to show you the other end but basically I'm going to do the exact same thing to fill it in uh the next thing we're going to deal with is the uh jams and the door stops okay so as far as the frames go like I said these doors all come mached for the hinges the the knobs that sort of thing uh this particular brand this hinge side is reversible doesn't matter which ends up or down the hinges are spaced out to work out exactly the same for the uh knob side because the the knob is always towards the bottom section of the door not it's not in the center of the door this side is made reversable so it could swing either for a left or right hand swing so what I always do once I get the pieces all out of the package is I just stand these two jams up and you know imagine in my mind walking into this room and I I look then and make sure okay yeah I got the knob on the right side hinges are swinging the right side this is the way for this room that this Jam would sit then I simply stand them together cuz those are the two faces I want stand them together and then I mark them right away while I'm still thinking of it so I Mark what room there for and then I I mark Mark the top on each one just so I can't hopefully get it too screwed up if I set them down and get sidetracked or something okay so so I start out with that um now in your package you're also going to have the the the header piece and the stop which uh you know we don't have to cut obviously because we're not changing the width and the side stops which we will cut to length so so that's everything that you're going to find in that package so moving on uh really simply the best thing to do is especially in my case because I was cutting off some off the top and some off the bottom I want to cut those exact same amounts off the top and off the bottom identical to what I did on the door otherwise your hinge and your and your uh latch your your knob area are not going to line up again you're going to get this all in there and and the door just isn't going to fit into it okay so I've already pre-marked that out on mine so because I knew what I you know had to cut off the top of the door I've got to cut that exactly off here same thing on the bottom now i' simply just cut it on this saw I I don't think I need to show you how to use this miter saw so uh simply mark them both out cut them on the saw okay as easy as that so I'm going to set those to the side so same thing on here now this obviously doesn't matter you just need to cut the same total amount off that you cut off the door so I just simply have that marked from one end the total amount I think was 7 and 58 or something like that and same idea I just simply cut it on the miter saw and those are cut to length and ready to go so that stuff's pretty easy like I said I don't have to do anything with the the header jam and the header stop those are good to go um that pretty much wraps things up one thing I do want to touch on though if you're doing a buold door which is very common as well for me to do here is a a sample of a bfold section that I cut off doesn't matter if it's the top or the bottom it's always going to have a hole in it cuz that's where uh part of the hardware goes so as you SE me cut those other the other door there and I slid in that piece glued it in clamped it in once that's all dry or even ahead of time of gluing in I want to make sure I drill that hole back in that piece that I've added in the top of the door otherwise I'm going to get it on site and it's not going to you know I'm going to have to drill it there or whatever so I just simply make the me take the measurements right off the existing piece that I uh cut cut off and uh you should have no problems and that's uh I think that's generally a 716 hole but just measure it and and be sure for your Hardware okay so I just wanted to mention that cuz uh it's it won't be that uncommon to cut a by a fold door as well I don't think there's anything else I can blabber on about on this topic so I think we've covered basically everything that was there so uh like I always say it's great if you guys like the video you like what we're doing here click the little thumbs up icon for us um you can follow us on Facebook Twitter uh come over to patreon and have a scan around there see if you might want to leave me a little tip and uh and uh just in general uh make a comment on the video I I try to read all the comments I don't always respond to all the comments but uh you know make your comment there if you do have a question though about this or anything else go to The Forum for sure go to The Forum post your question up there you get a response every time to your question on the Forum so so uh anyways uh what's your project today was it cutting down a door hopefully that what I just showed you will help you out thanks again\n"