Have just acquired an Everest white aluminium door which I thought I might use to replace my ageing wooden back door. 30mm glazing, so can't be that old. It comes with an aly surround, but this doesn't have enough rigidity to call it a frame. I imagine I'm going to have to construct something out of wood to take it, but in many ways it would be easier to fix the surround directly to the masonry top and bottom. Is there any reason why this isn't a good idea?
Most recent aluminium doors come with frames which are designed to fix straight to brickwork - but previously (20 years ago?) they invariably had (and needed) hardwood frames between the bricks and the aluminium. How old is the door which you have acquired?
Stuart Noble coughed up some electrons that declared:
I have removed an ali door that is at leats 20 years old that was fixed directly to brick. The frame is strong but it's not very thick and clearly relied on being fixed at regular intervals.
If you use frame packers so doing the screws up tight doesn;t warp the frame, but allows you to get a good hold with the screws, I see no problems at all. Run a bit of mortar or PU foam around depending on gap size - that will firm it up nicely, as I found with my new PVC windows (good fit ith 6 frame screwed, unmovable after foaming in).
If this is in a kitchen, be prepared for pools of water under it when the cold weather hits. We are about to replace an aly door with composite - condensation from ours is a real issue, although ours is probably 30 years old with knackered seals etc.
However, the frame bit looks like it's basically a C section, which is flat on the back of the bit shown. Is that correct? If so, it's meant to go into a hardwood frame. If it was meant to go straight to brickwork it would have an H section, with the 'legs' contacting the bricks.
Yes, it's a c section, but I wonder what the function of the hardwood frame would be. H section would obviously be more rigid, but I'm sure I could compensate with enough foam and fixings. Then again I might just set the frame in a wooden surround with a step. At least that way I could do most of the work in advance of ripping the old one out, but then I'll have exterior wood to maintain
The wood - or the legs of an H-section frame - provide bending stiffness. With a wooden frame, the ally will be flat against the wood, and if the brickwork is irregular, there will be uneven gaps between the wood and the brick - which you fill with sealant. If you try to screw the ally straight to the bricks, chances are that it will bend.
Some of my ally windows have more like an F section, with one leg which goes
*almost* to the brickwork - with the wooden frame going all the way, and with the otherwise exposed bit of wood being covered by sealant - so they're zero maintenance.
The guy that came to quote reckons it needs hardwood, but only to fill the gaps at the sides i.e. not a frame as such. £150 plus materials. Worth that just to avoid the d-i-y scenario whereby it's supper time and we still don't have a working back door.
:-) I replaced our front door a few weeks ago, which was quite a hassle as our house wasn't built when they had any particular standards - so all modern doors are a bit higher than the opening (width-wise it was OK, thankfully).
All went well, but making an opening taller whilst keeping things structurally sound and not destroying half the walls seems to be something of an art.
I've still got to paint the darn thing and seal around the frame and add some trim to the interior...
I've seen people try to cut doors and frames down to size before, and it seems to be one of those things that Never Ends Well.
Was this what they call a pre hung door with its own frame etc?
The art of staying below the lintel :-) Height is my problem too. By knocking the plaster off I can see what I assume is the bottom edge of a wooden lintel above the existing frame, so in theory the top of the aly could be fixed to the underside of that, leaving me 30mm to play with at the bottom. I gather this should be a sill of some kind so that the drainage slots in the frame empty on to a sloping surface. With the sides it seems you don't know what wooden framing you need until you've knocked the old one out. Maybe I'll take out a small cross section to get the profile of the brickwork. I'm beginning to see the advantage of upvc doors where framing isn't an issue.
Yep. Just a cheapy job, nothing fancy - I'm banking on replacing it with something nicer in a few years. One of the kids managed to break some of the glass in the old door, and as that one had seen better days anyway it was a case of rushing out and buying a replacement quickly.
I ended up taking some height out of the lintel (which was a pair of 2x6's), but had enough space to add more material and make it thicker, which should help. It won't be as strong as it was, and I'd definitely have done something else if there was a storey above to support, but I'm confident it'll be enough for what it needs to do (flat roof above, snow weight in Winter, someone occasionally walking up there to do DIY stuff etc.)
We put in a new door at the brother-in-law's place last weekend, and that one was interesting; at some point in the past someone had taken out material below the door frame to make the old door and frame fit - which is perhaps not unreasonable, except they'd done it with a chisel by the looks of it (or possibly with their teeth :-) so that nothing at all down there was straight or level any more. We ended up putting in a whole new bunch of support-work just to get things nice and flat and provide a base for the new door/frame.
Hmm, well 30mm sounds like it might be enough for a wooden sill/step, just... although I expect you can buy aluminium ones pretty cheaply which will have a much lower profile (the door I got has one which can't be more than 20mm in height) - or maybe you can source one at a suitable junkyard / recyclers (or via local Freecycle list) from a door that someone's dumped.
I think the typical approach is to rip everything out that's related to the old door and its frame, measure, buy a new door that's as close as possible to the available width - then do whatever work's necessary to the opening to get the height right, put new door/frame in and shim out as needed, insulate any gaps, then add trim (and seal up) to hide all the grotty-looking stuff.
Given that you have the door, taking a cross-section seems like a good idea and will allow you to assemble some likely materials for a frame - then it shouldn't take too long when it comes to it to make something functional. Adding the bits to make it look pretty can come later...
Out of interest, what does pre hung mean? Has the carpentry stuff for hinges and locks been done? I hate all that chiselling, mainly because mine isn't perfect I suppose. I noticed recently on a professionally installed front door that the lock wasn't quite square, so that the key went in at a slight angle. I couldn't live with that, especially if I'd done it myself.
More plaster hacking shows that my wooden lintel is 3" high and at least that deep (can't see the far end), so I should be able to take a half an inch section out of that to allow for a standard hardwood sill at the bottom. I think I'd prefer that to reducing the sill thickness.
Now that's a thought. Looks like they only come with the doors though. The supplier I rang only stocks upvc sills, but at least they're only 30mm
In an ideal world, but I can't get all that done in a day. Maybe not even half of it!
I'm still tempted by the local handyman doing it for £150, especially as DG was his trade for 30 years. However, "Give me another ring in a month" sounds alarm bells. I've learnt that there is a particular breed of tradesman that is always on the verge of doing the job but never quite does.
I think it simply means the door comes with a frame and has the hinges attached - I'm not sure if it provides any guarantees about lock holes etc.
The one I got had the holes drilled / cut in the door to take standard handles and locks (there seem to be two standards around for the size of the circulr holes, and two for the distance from the door edge to the centre of the holes, but modern lock kits come with bits so they'll work with any combination).
I had to do a little bit of chiselling work on the frame though so that it'd accept the lock-plates that I had in the lock/handle kit that I'd bought separately.
Yes, that seems reasonable, given that the span for a door frame isn't
*that* wide.
Well, if you can get the door in place roughly one day, that's probably good enough for overnight, then you can work on the rest the next.
I'm just doing the sealing and insulating on our front door this afternoon, and I put the actual door in 3-4 weeks ago :-)
Is there any way you can get the height for the replacement door (cutting the lintel as needed) whilst the current door's still in place? I think that's the 'scary' bit personally - I just didn't know how long that bit would take or what I'd find when I started hacking into the plasterboard on teh one side, or cladding on the outside.
All the rest was pretty straightforward once I knew I had enough width and height for the opening.
Taking half an inch off the bottom of the lintel wouldn't be easy. Not enough access for a router or circ saw. Maybe a series of plunges with a kitchen hinge cutter and chisel the rest. I'm exhausted just thinking about it :-)
Continuing this (I don't move fast), this is a cross section of the aly frame.
fit but, with just two 1mm legs in contact with the wood, it would need to be mighty accurate to avoid leaks. Am I missing a gasket of some kind, or is it just a silicone job?
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