Kitchen- Replacing a sliding glass door
Posted by Wayne
The first task I took on in the kitchen was replacing the sliding glass door leading to the back deck. The door I was replacing was metal, brownish/green, was constantly coming off the track on the bottom, and wouldn’t lock so the previous owners of the house has sawed down a broom handle to just the right length so you could lay it down in the track behind the closed door and the door wouldn’t open. Needless to say, this all had to go to make our kitchen look decent.
Our original plan was to install french doors, however after mulling over the extra clearance space needed around the inward swinging french doors we took the safe route and installed a new vinyl sliding glass door. We really wanted the french doors, but the space where the door is located is just too crowded to be swinging a door into it.
The sliding glass door we found is actually a bit of a compromise because it is made to look like french doors.
I believed the existing door would be easy to remove because I could see that there were only a few screws holding it in through the frame and believed there would only be nails holding from the outside.Winter was approaching fast, and I couldn’t risk having that big of a hole in the house for any length of time, so I prepped very well to make the switch go fast when the time came.
The first step was to remove the trim around the door on both the inside and outside. Once I had the outside trim removed, I ran into a small issue. The door itself has a flange (or lip) around the entire perimiter that stays on the outside of the house/door frame when the door is installed, while the rest of the door fits into the frame. I expected to see that this flange had some additional nails holding it to the house, expected to quickly remove those, and be ready to pull the door right out. However, the siding of the house was covering this flange and right up to the edges of the door. In other words, to get the flange exposed, my options were to tear off a lot of siding, or cut a few inches off the siding around the door. I decided on the latter.
The siding of our house is big flat wood panels (not overlapping planks), so this was fairly easy to cut. Besides, removing several of these panels was quite frankly not a real option. Before I know it I’d have half the siding on the house taken off.
I set my circular saw to a very shallow cutting depth so it would only cut the siding about 5/6th of the way through. I didn’t want to damage the foam insulation boards underneath. Once I had cut around the entire door I could easily tear off the trim and expose the flange. As I suspected, the flange had many nails holding the sliding glass door to the house. Once I had the flange exposed, I knew I could have the old door out in about 5 minutes time.
The next day I woke up bright and early and removed the heavy glass doors from the inside and set them aside, and removed the frame for the old door from the house. My brother came over to help me carry the new vinyl sliding glass doors around to the back of the house and up onto the back deck. We moved it into place and were not too excited to learn that the new door is about 1.5 inches shorter than the old door. I guess I evidently only took quick measurements of the old door before I went to buy the new one, and after quickly checking out the measurements on the new doors I wrongly assumed it was just a standard size for sliding glass doors.
We immediately went to home depot and bought an 8 foot 2×4 and then to my brother’s house to rip the 2×4 on his tablesaw down to about 1.25 tall. We went back to my house, secured this 2×4 in place underneath the existing upper framing, and then the door fit perfectly. After applying caulk to the bottom of the door frame and around the inside of the flange, we placed the door back into the frame and secured it in place with roofing nails.
The last step was to get an airtight seal, so from the inside I applied foam in between the door frame and the new door. My last step in the kitchen will be to redo the trim around the door and floor to cover up this foam filled gap, so for now we’re still looking at the unfinished door. At least wind isn’t coming in.
The new white door made the room a lot brighter and surprisingly a lot quieter as well. This was an easy project and well worth the effort. And yes, we were able to get rid of the sawed-off broom stick.
After
Total Cost: $400, Total Time: 3 hours
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