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Exterior door installation is not as hard as you might think
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Hi, I'm Tim Carter from Ask the Builder.com, but before we install an exterior door, we've got to take one out
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Let's get started right now. The first step in my opinion to remove an exterior door is to start from the inside and remove the trim away from the door so you
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you can see what you're up against. Okay, I've got the trim off and I'm ready to take the door out
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But before I do that, I want to stop and I want to take some measurements
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Here's why. I want to ensure that the new door is the right size
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Imagine the nightmare if you were to actually take this door out and then find out that the new door is either way too small or it's too big for the opening
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We ready to go The new door is going to fit perfectly Let go take the other one out right now It time to take the exterior trim off I going to take two of the three pieces off
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I'm going to take off the two side pieces of trim, but not the top piece
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And the reason I don't want to take the top piece off is there's an integral flashing on top of the trim
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that goes back up behind the siding. And I can actually install the new door
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by tilting it backwards and bringing it up to the top piece of trim so I'm not taking off. Most of the time you're going to do the same thing
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You might have to take the trim off all the way around the door or in certain rare instances you might not have to
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take off any trim, but I guarantee you there's a really good chance you're going to be taking
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some trim off. One final tip. I'm actually going to use a razor knife to slice through any caulking
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that might be between the side of the trim and the wood siding on the other side. That's really important if you don't do
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that, you'll actually rip the siding apart. So take your time with a razor knife and see if you can't
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slice some of that cock. Got a little problem here already. You can see that as I
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try to take this trim off, the siding is coming with it. So what I'm going to do is
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actually tap the siding with a two by four block to try to break it loose from the trim board
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Okay, we got the first piece of trim off, a little bit of damage, but we can repair it, so let's keep moving forward
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off a whole lot easier than the right side. We're getting really close to getting this door
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out of the opening. Okay we've got the interior trim off, the exterior trim. Now to make it a little
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easier, let's get some of the weight off this system. And of course that means just simply take
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the door off the hinges so the only thing that's left is the actually the door jam and in my case
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the side lights. So let's just simply pop the door off the hinges. Well I'm just going to simply remove the hinge pins
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so that I can lift the door off the hinges and carry it outside
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The doors off the hinges were ready to take the jam out and finish the job But as I was removing the door I remembered that this door has got an alarm system And there is a switch that
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up in the jam here that's hardwired. And if I just rip the jam out, I could damage the wiring
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So I now have to carefully cut away the drywall, find the wires to the alarm system
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and cut them so that I can reinstall that switch in the new door
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Now that the wires are cut to the alarm system, there's really only one last thing to do
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Cut away the nails that are holding the door to the rough jam
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I like to use a saw saw saw for that purpose, and I've got a special aggressive blade that not only will cut wood
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it'll also cut the thin metal of the nails that are holding the jam in place
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Oh yes, sometimes you got to use the persuader to get that door out
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It can be a little tight sometimes, but it looks like the door is going to tilt in right now
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and we're basically done with the job
