Pre-hung door question

[Bob Cooper]

I’ve installing and then trimming out some pre-hung doors in my basement. I’d like to know how folks deal with the situation when the walls are not co-planer. So I’ve got the hinge side all plumb and flush with the drywall but to get the door to close evenly it would seem that the opposite wall isn’t totally inline

I can cut away drywall easy enough but then the jamb sticks out at the opposit end

My thoughts are to try and bump the wall into line but curious what you finish carpenters do.

[Dave Zellers]

I always hung the door so it closes perfectly and either pad out the trim or cut out the back of the trim to fit. If one side of the door came pre trimmed, you may need to take it off. Set the door in the opening with shims at the top over the 2 jambs pushing down onto the floor. Then you can play around with tiny adjustments and split the difference where it is out of line with the wall.

[Steve Demuth]

If the wall is actually movable, making it truly planar would be fine. Most walls, unless it's new construction and the walls not yet finished or sheetrock hung, can't be moved much though.

In that case, you set the door jambs plumb and take the slop out in the finish trim. There are different ways of doing this. For small deviations, the fact that your trim has hollow back surfaces gives you enough flexibility to just force the trim to fit (that's part of why the trim has hollow backs). Using finish screws can help make that stick. For bigger deviations, some combination of carefully cutting away some of the drywall thickness, and cutting thin tapers to put behind the trim, will get the job done.

[Dave Zellers]

You can also adjust the stop with a rabbit plane. But wait for the door to acclimate to the new environment.

[Mark Bolton]

The "knock knee'd" thing is pretty tough to deal with if your not running split jambs. Its why split jambs are so popular now. They still dont allow a perfect solution for knocked knees but they give you an additional level of adjustment albeit small.

If they are all pretty consistently bad I would suggest applying a glued and clamped extension to the jambs before you hang them that can then be planed/sanded flush with the wall face allowing you to set the door slab plumb and take out the knock knee in the extensions that likely no one will see.

On rare occasions when I had the foresight to catch this early we would just bring in the doors with solid jambs over width. But its a miserable job because you now have no quick face to rely on when hanging the door and have to use a jamb level on every opening then of course go back and trim back and ease all the jamb faces.

[Bob Cooper]

So on the side where the jamb is proud of the drywall would you try and use a flush trim router to bring that edge down?

[Mark Bolton]

Router with a flush trim bit can be a very sketchy option. It doesnt take a lot for the router to grab and pull the bit into the jamb compressing the drywall and then youve got a nasty dent/deep cut in the jambs. Its not impossible but beyond that typically on a jamb your not looking duplicate every slight imperfection in the wall surface to the jamb face (surface of the moon). Usually a hand plane (power or other) followed by a chisel at the base where the nose of the plane holds you back seems to have been my tact.

None are great/fast options. But if its out of whack, it is what it is.

[Eric Schmid]

How far off flush? Is there a side where you won’t see the outside edge of the trim? Modifying doors and jambs is a last resort. As is said here, you can adjust the wall or adjust the trim. If the wall is way out, adjust the wall if possible. If it’s a little out, adjust the trim.

You can also split the difference to reduce the twist by half on each side. Depending on the trim profile, you may not need to modify anything.

Most trim is painted, so it’s really not an issue if the trim stands off the wall slightly, shimmed. Just put that side where it’s less visible. The more difficult side is the side that’s shy of flush with the wall. You can back cut some trim to relieve the material interfering at the wall.

A good finish carpenter can make walls look better than they are. Houses are imperfect structures. We try to get them as close as possible, but wood does move and deform. It’s an imperfect medium.

I have a couple of doors that move vertically from season to season due to changes in moisture in the rafters above. I took the last resort step of shaving some off the top of the door so it can close. The rough opening is twisted pretty good, so it’s a project I haven’t wanted to get into. I have a new appreciation for hollow core doors :-(

[Mark Bolton]

How far off flush? Is there a side where you won’t see the outside edge of the trim? Modifying doors and jambs is a last resort. As is said here, you can adjust the wall or adjust the trim. If the wall is way out, adjust the wall if possible. If it’s a little out, adjust the trim.

You can also split the difference to reduce the twist by half on each side. Depending on the trim profile, you may not need to modify anything.

Most trim is painted, so it’s really not an issue if the trim stands off the wall slightly, shimmed. Just put that side where it’s less visible. The more difficult side is the side that’s shy of flush with the wall. You can back cut some trim to relieve the material interfering at the wall.

A good finish carpenter can make walls look better than they are. Houses are imperfect structures. We try to get them as close as possible, but wood does move and deform. It’s an imperfect medium.

I have a couple of doors that move vertically from season to season due to changes in moisture in the rafters above. I took the last resort step of shaving some off the top of the door so it can close. The rough opening is twisted pretty good, so it’s a project I haven’t wanted to get into. I have a new appreciation for hollow core doors :-(

How do you adjust the trim? Plowing material off the back of the trim (unless its deeply back relieved) is a nightmare. And Im not really clear on most trim being painted.. 35 years and I dont think we ever did a painted interior. It was all natural, stain, clear. Your not getting away with an HGTV caulk job on clear finish.

Other than rolling the trim into, or out of, the opening, there is really no way to fudge any substantial knock knee'd situation out of the opening. If the head is straight and the hinge/strike jambs are out at the bottom by a tiny bit you may be able to roll it out in the trim but very much at all and the slab isnt hitting the stops.

[Steve Rozmiarek]

Waudena Millworks split jam system, Trim in Time, is my go to. We sometimes make something similar, but easier to just buy the doors already set up.

[Bob Cooper]

I really don’t care for painted trim so I’m this house it’s cypress with poly. 1x4 on the sides and 1x6 for the header

[Dave Zellers]

We need to get down to the nitty gritty.
• We now know you are using your own cypress for the trim so the pre hung door is without trim at this point.
• You have said that the walls are not co-planer but not by how much.
• What are your capabilities? Do you have a table saw with a dado? If so, you can plow out a 1/8" x 1 1/2" dado on the back
to allow you to scribe up to an eighth off either the sheetrock side or the jamb side.
• Do you own a block plane? If you are using flat trim then the forgiveness level of forcing the trim to touch the wall and the jamb drops off.
If you force it an eighth of an inch, you will see that it is crooked where it meets the floor.

This problem needs to be solved within your capabilities. But to the main point that three of us have said, forget about aligning the door perfectly with the hinge side, and center the door in the middle of the outside of the parameters of the wall thickness wise. If say, the top right is out an eighth from the bottom left, you will only have to deal with a sixteenth at any single point, and that is easy-peasy.

[Bob Cooper]

Ok. Yes flat trim
I do own a table saw and a block plane
I do have a dado blade
I have about 8 of these and have only set two. One was fine and the other was out a good 1/4” if not more both directions but that’s assuming it’s left flush on the hinge side.

Here’s what I did in this case...I took a sledgehammer and bumped the bottom of the fall. Not terribly hard but a reasonable amount of force. That seemed to help quite a bit and almost bring it into square.

I’m asking these general questions because I assume I’m going to see varying degrees of this as I set these doors and wanted some thoughts on what folks did

One follow up question. If the stop was not attached to the jam could one just install the jamb even twisted but such that it’s flush in the opening and the ninstall the stop flush against the door? Or would you run into other issues if you did this?

[Dave Zellers]

"I took a sledgehammer"...
I LOVE this! Been there done that! The old BFH. But realize if you don't secure the wall in it's new position, it will find it's way back to it's old position.

If the stop is not attached, you ABSOLUTELY set the door to the wall and then set the stop to the door. UNLESS the wall is so out of plumb the door can't hold it's position when it's open.
Sounds like a fun and challenging project. If you are so inclined, a job like this is pure Zen. Analyze, Analyze, Analyze the situation. If you are able, eliminate time from the equation and figure out exactly what is the problem and what is the solution. This is why I said in my first reply, push the door down to the floor with shims to hold it in place, and play around with what happens when you move the bottoms or the tops a sixteenth here or there. Tiny adjustments can fix many problems.

[Bob Cooper]

It is definately a test of patience and then thinking thru what’s going on