Home sweet home

Jumping to the aid of new home buying family members, Glenn Perry sets about replacing an old, worn out door with a custom-made framed ledge and braced version.

My niece and her fiancée recently purchased an early 19th-century terraced cottage in Epping Forest. The front door, a traditional design, had suffered from exposure to our damp weather . Without a front porch or canopy to protect it, years of rain had run down the outside causing serious rot to the bottom .The door, made of European redwood, a softwood,was not original. With a framed ledge and braced construction, it is a standard joinery item, but at around 1.9m high and 711mm wide, it is not a standard size, being a lot smaller than a modern, off the peg one. I have seen quite a few standard doors trimmed to within an inch of their life to fit a much smaller frame. One I saw recently had a 75mm wide bottom rail, which probably started off at 150mm.

Weighing up the job

I agreed to make a new door. I inspected the existing door frame and it appeared sound. The door only had a Yale-type lock/latch, so a five-lever mortise lock would have to be fitted for security and insurance reasons. I would keep the existing lock in the same position. Using metric sizes, the exterior door would be made 44mm thick. The match boarding or TGV is 88mm wide when fitted together and is 14mm-thick. As the match boarding would run the whole length vertically from the 44mm-thick top rail to the bottom, it would mean the bottom rail and the middle ledge would be 30mm-thick (I actually made this a fraction under).