March 16th - New Carpet
Last week, you saw how I prepped the unit for carpeting. Everthing was up off the floor, and stuffed into the kitchen and bathroom. Additionally, I removed all of the interior doors - installers will appreciate that! The first thing the installers do is install tack strips, then they roll out the new padding.
After that, the new carpet is rolled out, stretched, seamed and trimmed. Looking even better now!
That wooden knob in the picture above is hanging from the ceiling fan.
March 17th & 18th - New Doors
Once everything was looking so nice, I just couldn't bring myself to put the old doors back up. They were showing their age, with scattered dents and multiple layers of paint. So a trip to Home Depot later, I had the new doors in the unit. I went with the six-panel colonial style doors to replace the old plain doors for two basic reasons. First, the plain lauan doors require two coats of paint to look decent, while the six-panel versions are already primed. One less coat of paint to apply saves time! Secondly, my personal opinion is that the six-panel doors have a more upscale look to them. At only about $8 more per door, they are well worth it!
Another nice thing was that the Home Dept had all but one of the doors "pre-cored". This means that the holes for the lockset are already bored, which saves even more time. Plan on adding another $6 to the price for the pre-cored models. The closet door didn't come already cored, so I'll have to drill into that one.
Painting the doors goes quickest if you have a lot of room and sawhorses. I partly drive nails into the ends of the doors, and then let the nails rest on the horses. This way, I can paint all sides of the doors in one session. The trick is to paint most of the face of one side, leaving room so that you can pick them up and flip them over. Once flipped, fill in the unpainted spots from underneath. The paint the second face and all of the edges.
I only had 4 sawhorses with me, so only 3 of six doors were painted each night after work.
March 20th - Door Hanging
Saturday the 19th was pretty well lost, since I had to work the regular job. On Sunday the 20th, I went back over to hang the freshly-painted doors. One hassle with a carpeted place is that the bottoms of the doors will most likely need to be trimmed to operate. There is no set rule, like "Trim off one inch for carpet", since the amount of material to remove will vary depending on how the carpenter hung the doors. Long story short, you need to trim each door to fit the situation. You can trim the doors either before or after painting, preferrably before. With my schedule, I simply didn't have this luxury - the doors had to be painted first. So, when it came time to trim, several strips of making take are put down to protect the paint from getting scraped by the base of the circular saw.
See the nasty old doors off to the right in the picture above? Also, notice that I stuck the end of the door out on the balcony to reduce the amount of sawdust that was spread in the unit.
For hanging the doors, I bought non-mortising door hinges. These nifty little hinges don't usually require any cutting or routing of the doors - nice time savers! The 4" models that I bought were long enough to cover over the old mortices in the existing door jambs.
Of course, old construction is never "square", so in the picture above you may notice that this hinge was mortised in to achieve proper door alignment.
Well, that's it for this week. Most of the heavy work is done, so it's all those "little things" that need to be finished up. For example, I still need to replace all of the crusty old light switches and outlets. The tenant moves in next week, so it's time for me to get them all knocked out. Come back again to see how it ends!