The Back Door - 1

This is the first in what I know will be several posts about the back door.  It has a number of issues that need to be corrected.

• The exterior has needed new finish for longer than we've been in the house.
• The weatherstripping doesn't seal properly - you can see daylight between the door and the jamb.
• The gap between the door and jamb is inconsistent. The bottom half is fine, but the top half is more than a quarter-inch.
• The doorknob latch doesn't.
• The rimlock night latch is sketchy. The latch keeper looks like it would fall off at the slightest touch.
• Several of our keys stopped working reliably, which means the cylinder is worn  and is about to give it up.

So the time has come. Night latches aren't that secure, so I found a deadbolt to replace it. It arrived just before the kids went off to college. That meant my threat to change the locks wasn't really a joke...

As you can see in this photo of me removing the old bits, there are failed attempts to bridge the gap between the door and jamb. The spring bronze should work, but the adhesive-backed foam in the background is applied to the jamb as a backup.

In several places the spring bronze had cracked along the crease between the nailing flange and the leaf. It's hard to know for sure, but maybe that the reason for the (ineffectual) foam strip.

In more than a couple of places there were random nails through the spring bronze (needle nose pliers points to one example). These were usually long brads rather than the (appropriate) copper nails. If there is a reason or rhyme to this, it escapes me. I don't see why you'd want to prevent the leaf from pushing against the door; that's the whole point of weatherstripping.

Once I got the old weatherstripping bits off, I fashioned a filler strip to even out the gap, much like I did on the second floor door eons ago.

It is tapered to get the gap between the door and jamb to a consistent 1/8-inch from top to bottom. I had to use some spare copper nails to keep it from curling on the thin end while the glue dried.

I also used some Abatron WoodEpox to fill the old holes in the jamb. The old hole for the doorknob's latch plate was a mess and the plate was installed improperly so that it didn't line up with the bolt. That's mostly fixed now and the strike plate and bolt line up so that they function properly; it actually latches now. To get it to look nice will require a bit more filler.

I then morticed out the new deadbolt strike. (But kept the old rimlock keeper in place while all this was happening. I needed to make sure I could still lock the door at night until the new deadbolt was in place... I'll have to fill in the casing later...)

Then I could install the new deadbolt. It required enlarging the hole through the door and drilling a hole through the edge of the door for the bolt (rimlocks are surface mounted). The thumbturn on the back of the door still isn't installed because ... this door is 2 1/4-inches thick. Despite what the manufacturer's specs say, the standard tailpiece only works with doors up to 1 3/4-inches thick. They're sending a new cylinder with the extended tailpiece. And there is other stuff I can do while I'm waiting.

For example, you can also see that I started sanding the door in preparation for its new coat of finish.