Exterior Door Installation, a Dummy Speaks

Door framing schematic

One of our staffers briefly wrote how-to posts for eHow.com back in the day, which is how we happen to have some inside knowledge of the workings of Demand Media Studios. More than accuracy and more than honesty, the folks at DMS valued SEO – search engine optimization. Their SEO gurus had determined that the optimum length for such content is 300-500 words, hence the all-holy minimum word count. Most of the time we find that candidates from DMS¹ pad their answers with useless (and sometimes wrong) material to reach that MWC. In this case, however, Billy McCarley had to omit useful information to pare "Exterior Door Installation Instructions"² down to stay in the sweet spot.

That posed a problem. The history student's post at HomeSteady.com contains within it a germ of accuracy, but McCarley had already blown much of his maximum 500 words explaining how to remove the old door, which meant he had to compress his installation instructions into less than a third of his 466 words. His original reference? Lowe's used 522 words; Billy trimmed that to 151. Along the way, he explained that,

"...the door frame exterior molding must set [sic] flush against the 2-by-4 framing of the opening on the outside of the wall..."

...which is , shall we say, "ambiguous" – probably because McCarley doesn't know what "flush" means. He also instructs his readers to,

"Wrap the 2-by-4 framed door opening of the exterior wall with felt paper and attach with construction staples."

Dude, the house wrap is supposed to already be in place (and it isn't "felt," for what that's worth). But Billy's best work is encapsulated in these two sentences:

"While a helper holds the door in place, slide shims in between the door frame and the wall framing at the hinges on one side and the strike plate on the opposite side. Attach the door at the shims using a nail gun or a hammer and 10-penny finish nails."

That's wrong in so many ways, Billy! First, you don't bother to explain that the shims are there to plumb the frame, second, you need to install a lot more than just three shims, and last, a builder does not "Attach the door at the shims," a builder nails through the door jamb (a word McCarley doesn't seem to know) and the shims into the rough framing
Anyone who followed the "instructions" cribbed by our Dumbass of the Day would be a burglar's dream: the door would just fall out when he pushed it!

¹ DMS, as in "You can't spell 'dumbass' without 'DMS,'" has since changed its name to Leaf Group. 
² The original has been deleted by Leaf Group, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was   ehow.com/way_5344221_exterior-door-installation-instructions.html

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