Installing a Prehung Door for Dummies

Pre-hung doors

It's often been said that "Those who can, do; those who can't, teach." Around the Antisocial Network, we like to add the following corollary: "Those who know nothing, freelance." Perhaps that seems rather cynical, but we suggest that you visit a content farm some time and read a handful or two of articles about any topic with which you're familiar: you'll probably start saying that same thing immediately! Today, we meet a business school graduate who considers herself a "freelance writer and editor"; a freelancer we would never hire to do any odd jobs around our offices, based on the mess Sue Lynn Carty (aka Sue-Lynn Carty in her incarnation at eHow.com) made when posting "Install a Prehung Door"¹ at LoveToKnow.com (where she probably should stick to her comfort zone, astrology and feng shui).

It's no secret that content-farm freelancers who don't know how to do something often just find an authoritative website and perform a copy-reword-paste job on it. They have to reword because sites like eHow and, apparently, LoveToKnow hate "plagiarism"; which they define narrowly as "using the exact same words." Apparently it's fine to make up your own words, except when you don't know what the words mean. In Sue Lynn's case, she probably just went straight to This Old House (where anyone with a brain should go instead of to Ms Carty) and performed her editing magic on their content.

But to our point: we immediately realized that Sue Lynn knows naught of her topic from the manner in which she expresses it. Some dead giveaways?

First she says, "Remove and repair the old doorjamb if it is broken..." and then she says to "Install new doorjambs." We're a little curious about how one "breaks" a doorjamb, but OK. More to the point, why would you remove a doorjamb and then install doorjambs, plural? Of shimming up the new jamb, Carty tells us, "The gaps between the new door assembly and the new doorjambs should measure around a quarter of an inch on the top, bottom and sides. If your gaps measure larger than a quarter of an inch, you will need to use shims." But wait: don't you use shims to ensure that the jamb is plumb? Not that the gap is even everywhere? Sure you do! And then Sue Lynn claims, "Using a level, check to make sure the doorjambs are in line with the walls." We don't know about you, but that's not what we use levels for (we think she's talking about using a straightedge to be certain they're flush with the drywall, by the by). Finally, Carty instructs her readers to, "Nail the doorjamb into the studs at 12- to 16-inch intervals with 4d or 6d nails." We'd probably nail the jamb to the studs with 8d finish nails, making certain to nail through each shim. But what do we know? Sue Lynn tells us that as amateurs, we should "[Attach] the shims directly to the doorjamb..."

There is, of course, more along this vein, but by now we hope you've gotten the point: this is a set of "instructions" written by someone who maybe, just maybe, watched her "hubby" (or hired hand) perform the task. It was not written by someone who'd actually installed a prehung door at some point in her life; instead it was a faked experience. We gleefully call out freelancers like this with out Dumbass of the Day award. Feh.

¹ The post has been deleted, but you can still see it using archive.org's Wayback machine. Its URL was   homeimprovement.lovetoknow.com/Install_a_Prehung_Door

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