Ta-Door!

The door has been painted and the color is...

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...Naples Gold! I hope you like it. We do!

Primed and Ready!

The new doors are primed and ready for some color!






Get excited!

It's a Crestview!

We finally had our new double doors installed and they turned out great!!! However, as with any home improvement, we did have some issues along the way. For one thing, the hardwood floor that was installed by the previous owner. The current floor sits higher than it should. The old door was trimmed at the bottom in order for it too open. This meant that the new door would have to sit higher than the old door and that means we would have to cut into the header. So a 3 hour job quickly turned into an all day job.

This first picture shows the installers from Cablik Enterprises, the Atlanta dealer-installer for Crestview Doors, checking out what they are about to get in to. They had to cut away the drywall to see what kind of header was above the door and if there was any room to play with.



Here you can see what the header is really made of. Two 2x10's and some strips of plywood as a filler. Not the best but it's lasted for almost 50 years so I guess I shouldn't complain. You can also see how they had to chop an inch or so off the bottom in order to raise the door enough to fit.



Getting ready to yank the old door out.





My Dad getting in the way of a cool shot.



It was kind of crazy seeing the front of my house look so open. You can also see the Cablik guys getting the new door frame ready for installation.



The Crestview Door kits are really well done and the look pretty easy to install. I wish I had more doors that needed them.





I was so excited when the first door went on!





This is how the inside looks at the moment. Even though the drywall still needs to be fixed, the trim needs to be put on and the doors need to be stained, it still looks awesome. It's so nice having the extra light coming through the windows now.



The outside of the house looks a ton better too. However, I still need to pick a color for the door. It's a really tough decision! Any other suggestions or links to house pictures would be much appreciated.



Hopefully by next weekend the doors and trim will be painted. I will make sure to post pics as soon as it happens.

End of line.

Demolition Man

A couple of posts ago we talked about getting new doors. Well, the doors are sitting in our carport while we wait on the doorlite kit to show up so everything can be installed. Hopefully all of that will happen this week. Since we like to work on a budget around here we decided to do some of the prep work ourselves. We were curious about this step because we did not know how the door would be framed behind the drywall.





Unfortunately when we removed the baseboard the hardwood was cut. It does not go all the way to the wall in front of the non functioning side of the door. This will have to addressed once the new door gets in. Part of me is considering removing some of the hardwood in front of the door and replacing it with some sort of tile. This way when our shoes are wet we wont be messing up the wood as much. Thoughts?



We were lucky to find that there was another door behind the drywall and that all of the framing is correct for double doors.



Since we were feeling good about the ease of the door prep we got ambitious and decided to tackle the ugly box in the wall. This thing has been an interesting conversation piece. Most people don't realize that this finely crafted box was covering the old AC unit that is still hanging out of the side of the house. I was always curious why a nice box was made instead of removing the AC unit. Well apparently the reason is that the AC unit is heavy as hell. At first we tried to take the easy way out and just push the unit outside the house. That was a quick failure. Then we thought about just pulling it out on the inside of the house. We figured, due to the weight, that this would end in a failure as well. So we decided we needed to try and take apart as much of the unit as possible in order to lighten it. After about 3 hours we probably took off about 15 pounds. It was starting to get dark outside so we decided to just go ahead and pull it out. Luckily we didn't die when it eventually came out but it got scary for a minute there.



I was very worried what were going to find growing or living in here but we were surprised how clean it was.





Once we got the guts of the AC unit out we still had trouble getting the damn housing off.



After a lot of banging and bending it eventually happened.



I think the temporary cardboard patch adds a nice DIY touch to the house.



Before...



After...



Progress has never looked so crappy.

Hopefully in the next couple of days we can patch up the hole and make the house look normal from the outside for once.

End of line.