John Lindal’s Blog

Installing a Screen Door

June 5, 2006 on 10:33 am | In House | No Comments

I finally finished installing a screen door for our backyard door. It turned out perfectly, but what an ordeal. Not that it was conceptually difficult, but the instruction sheet was 5 inches square, so I had to think pretty hard before I started.

The first step was to make space for the hinges. It’s a bit scary when you have to chop out pieces of the door frame, because it’s really hard to put back. After three tries, the cuts were deep enough to allow the door to fit, but not too deep, so the door would still close. It’s the tightest fit I’ve ever seen — sub-millimeter clearances! There isn’t even space under the door to install the bottom sheath — not that I could figure out why it is necessary…

Of course, I messed up at one point when I thought that I needed to make the bottom cut deeper. It turned out that the screws poked through the door frame and refused to go into the wall, so they ended up pushing the doorframe out from the wall! So now there’s a shim to pad the cut. I’m going to buy shorter screws later today. Right now, there is only one screw — a lucky find from my collection of miscellaneous screws.

The next step was to install the handle. There ought to be a law against selling idiots like me a bi-directional drill. But, on the other hand, it was useful when the drillbit jammed… And I was really tired at that point. Hey, I only broke one bit.

The real fun was when I dropped a screw down through the handle hole. My first thought was to disassemble the door, but that would require re-installing the screen afterwards. After considering buying another screw, which wouldn’t have it’s head painted white and would therefore look pretty ugly, I decided to use the awesome power of magnetics. After unmounting the door, I put a strong horseshoe magnet near the holes that I had drilled and turned the door upside down so the screw would slide by the magnet. Unfortunately, magnetic fields don’t go through steel very well, so this didn’t work. Luckily, my multi-bit screwdriver includes a small magnet on a thin, telescoping rod. I was able to stick this through the hole at the appropriate crazy angle so the screw hit and stuck to the magnet as it slid by. Note that this is easier said than done. It took me at least five tries!

The last step was the latch bar. This was pretty simple, once I figured out where to put it to keep the door closed tightly against the frame.

All’s well that ends well…