Building An Exterior Door Jamb From Scratch

If you re not using premade jamb material or if your walls are a nonstandard thickness you can buy 5 or 6 inch wide lumber and rip cut it to the width of the wall using a table saw.

Building an exterior door jamb from scratch.

Building your own jambs is cost effective because you can purchase slab doors cheaper than prehung units. Hinges usually go 8 inches from the door s top 9 inches from the bottom and at the. Determine the size of the door opening. The size of the door opening will vary depending on the size of the door you plan to install.

Measure your door carefully and cut the opening to fit using a reciprocating saw. The door jamb is the vertical portion of the frame that runs along the sides of the door. This is the first of three videos on hanging doors for those who want to see nick s not really a workshop w. Installation of any door goes a lot easier if you mount the hinges on the door first rather than on the jamb.

Follow along i hope you ll learn something and enjoy created. When building a door jamb to fit a standard wall with a two by four frame and 1 2 inch drywall on each side the width of the jamb board typically is 4 9 16 inches. I m building a custom replacement exterior door for a roughly 100 year old house out of cedar. You can purchase precut boards for this project or you can purchase trim boards and cut them to size yourself.

A typical door opening is 2 inches 5 1 cm wider than the door size being installed to allow for the thickness of the jamb material and shims to plumb the jamb. Building a doorjamb is a relatively easy project. Measure the width and height of the door. Some preformed exterior doorjamb boards will already have weather stripping attached to them.

Add 1 1 2 inch to the height and cut two pieces.