How to Install a Prehung Door
Last weekend I hung the closet door and started the bedroom door. I couldnt' finish that because I was missing some hinges and the door stop. But the doors are going a lot easier now after I hung the bathroom door the week before. I just couldn't wrap my brain around what all the instructions were telling me at first. The biggest problem I had was figuring out how to hang a split jam prehung door like you get from Home Depot. I even asked a guy at Lowe's I think. He looked at me like I was an idiot when I asked it there was a simple way to hang it.
The thing I didn't understand initially was that with these prehung hollow doors you get from Home Depot are so light, you're not supposed to have to nail the door jamb into the the rough opening. Just nail into the casing trim that's already attached to the door. For more stability you can wedge shims between the jamb and the rough opening and nail the two together. Still most instructions are pretty lacking in exactly how to get things straight and plumb and what order to do stuff in. And guides like this one don't work because the door is precased so you'd have to remove the casing trim in order to hang a door like this. There are some that are even worse, like this one, that explain how to hang a door in two simple paragraphs. Thanks Better Homes and Gardens!
The best set of instructions I found was off of This Old House's website, but unfortunately now you can only read that online content by subscribing to their magazine. Which is a real shame because it worked really well. Lucky for me, their web guys aren't the greatest because Google managed to ferret out the printable version of this article when I did a search. Sweet!
The basic differences are that they had you hang shims on the hinge side before putting the door in place, a shim on the floor if the floor isn't level, shims in the side opposite the door after it's in place, and replacing the middle screw of the hinge with a longer one that'll drive into the rough opening once everything is hung. It's complicated but check out the article for details. No time to go into it now. I've got stuff to do.
Oh yeah, I almost forgot. I had to chisel out a hole in the door jam of the closet door for the automatic switch. When it's installed it'll turn on a closet light when you open the closet automatically. Just another crazy idea I had to throw in to make my life harder.