The Dummies Guide to Widening Doors

This is a door header

The beauty (if you want to call it that) of Leaf Group's mass re-posting of eHow content is that in several of their niches, they've grouped similar-seeming content. That means that yesterday's DotD winner appears at Hunker.com followed by a second post on an almost identical topic... a post that's equally stupid. Here, without further ado, we present "How to Widen a Frame for an Exterior Door," originally posted to eHow by someone claiming to be Aryeh Raphael.

Regardless of his prowess as a web designer or his J-school graduate chops, Raphael was way beyond his expertise with this piece of claptrap. Just like J. Lang Wood, yesterday's dumbass, Aryeh did little more than skim the surface of a task he said,

"...can greatly change the way your room looks."

Of course, if you were senseless enough to follow Raphael's directions – in truth, we hesitate to call the text "instructions" – you would find yourself in a world of trouble. That's mostly because Aryeh doesn't address an exterior door; the steps are all cribbed from an unknown source, one that discusses widening an interior door.

And those steps? Check out some of the more doofus content...

2. "Cut into your current exterior doorway with a utility knife. You should cut where the inside of the doorway meets the door frame." – We think maybe that has something to do with cutting the caulk, but we aren't sure...
3. "Pry the door frame off the wall. Slowly pry along the sides of the door frame with a putty knife." – It's just possible Raphael means the casing molding, not the "frame" here...

4. "Mark the dimensions of the new door frame onto the wall. Measure how wide you want your door frame to be with a measuring tape. Mark the new width onto the wall with chalk." – Why does the phrase "rough opening" not appear here, hmmm?
5. "Cut a small hole on the wall you are going to widen using a drywall saw. Through the hole you will see the interior of the drywall. Check to see if there are pipes, wires or other impediments that you may disturb when you widen the wall." – Not an entirely brainless suggestion, except that you didn't come here to "widen the wall"!
6. "Cut the wall you are going to widen. Follow the guide that you made in Step 4 and cut through the wall." – Yup, just cut a hole in the side of the house. Never mind that there's a header above the opening supporting the weight of what's above it, never mind that you'll need to re-frame the opening, because all that's left for you to do is...
7. "Check if the dimensions that you cut are straight and level using a carpenter's level..." - ...and this is where Aryeh's post ends and, per archive.org, where it's always ended.

Suffice it to say that Raphael's version of widening a doorway may, in fact, be even more dangerously stupid than that put forth by Wood. We thought we'd be hard-pressed to find a worse job of DIY instructions than the one we featured yesterday, but lo and behold! there was an equally likely candidate for Dumbass of the Day right below it – and this one might well be the Dumbass of the Year!

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