Doors and Door Swing for the Complete Dummy

Door stop molding (arrow)

Every once in a while, some poor staffer gets stuck checking a slug of the past nominees for dead links. Sometimes a site is just plain gone, and sometimes the site remains but the post is gone. The latter is especially true of a couple of the niche sites into which Leaf Group poured old eHow.com content. When they delete one post, however, Leaf (usually) redirects the link to "related" content. The problem? When your content comes from the mother lode of misinformation, the new destination may be no more useful than the old. That happened recently, when a staffer was redirected to a Kevin McDermott post at HomeSteady.com: feast your eyes on "How to Rehang an Interior Door That Swings the Wrong Way."

Oddly enough, the post the staffer was checking was also by McDermott, who apparently thought himself an expert on doors.  Hint: he wasn't. We know that because McDermott had a pretty serious problem with the instructions he barfed up, mostly because his only "reference" was a set of instructions for hanging a door. According to Kevin, here's what you need to do:

1. Remove the door...
2. Remove the... [hinges]...
3. Move the hinge plate so the loose side (that was attached to the jamb) is hanging off the opposite side of the edge as it was before.... 
4. Mark around the plate...
5. Chisel out the wood within the [new mortise]... [Repeat]
6. Set the hinge plate... in the [mortise]. Sink new hinge screws into the plate to secure it. [Repeat]
7. Stand the door back in the doorway.... chisel [new mortises on the jamb], and set the plates back in place... Secure them with hinge screws.
8. Reverse the door latch and related hardware 

Here's what Kevin forgot – or, more likely, didn't know he needed to do:

• Somewhere he needs to fill in a gap in the edge of the door where the abandoned hinge mortise is exposed.
• Somewhere in there Kevin needs to fill the empty hinge and strike plate mortises on the door jamb.
• He's gonna need to cut a new mortise for the strike plate and drill a hole for the latch.
• Depending on the profile of the stop molding [image above], he may well need to reverse it.
• Nowhere does he point out that the door now has to be on the other side of the stop molding, a term he never even mentions.

McDermott thinks the reason people might need to do this is because "you’re remodeling your home." Trust us: even a Dumbass of the Day like Kevin is gonna want the end result to look better than what his "instructions" would leave!

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