This weekend we took on the installation of the French Doors. Because this was a major project, we brought in some help Saturday in the form of my friend Ethan. The work done on Sunday was just me and my father.
Starting at 9:00 AM on Saturday we got to work on finishing the demolition of the wall. This was by far the most fun part of the project. While removing the old windows we discovered a really interesting fact...the inside of the window frame was actually the stud with with white paint on it. Yes that's right, there really was no window frame. It also didn't take a great deal of effort to take the other pieces of the window out as they were only held in with a few nails. Once the windows were out we removed all of the outside wall and cut out the studs. We propped one up in the middle to make sure the roof did not collapse down on us (that would not have been good). I used this demolition phase as an opportunity to jump in and out of the windows.
Once demolition was done we got to work on rebuilding the wall. The first part was to level the floor because it was actually higher on one side than the other (this is probably why the old windows were crooked). We then built the frame for the new door. The header we used was massive. We put 2 2x8 pieces of LVL with a 1/2" piece of insulating foam between them. This left us with a very large and very heavy header that is much more than required by building code. We built the frame out on the deck and then knocked out our temporary supporting beam and carried it inside. Ethan and I then held the frame in place while my father positioned and nailed it. When the frame was in place we added a few more studs on each side of the frame so we had something to nail the external wall to. At this point we went into assembly line mode where Ethan would clean up the old piece of external wall, my father would measure and cut them, and I would nail them in place using the framing gun. Just so everyone is aware, the framing gun is by far the coolest tool one could ever buy (Nikki doesn't like it because the compressor makes an unpleasant sound).
When the wall was rebuilt we layed out some tar paper and stapled it place using the stapler-hammer thing as seen on Monster House. This was my job until my father took it away from me for not being able to use the stapler-hammer thing. As he took it away he turned to Ethan and said, "It's not his fault that he can't do this. I think he's retarded and he can't help it" (thanks dad).
Now came time to put the door in place. Ethan and I each took a side and my father held the middle as we lifted it into the hole. It fit perfectly! We nailed it in place and admired our work. The next step was to put this sticky rubber, tar, aluminum foil flashing stuff along the edge of the door. I have to say that this was quite miserable. The stuff was really sticky and didn't want to go where I wanted it to. Luckily we didn't have to use a lot of it to get the desired result.
As my father was finishing up around the external side of the door, Ethan and I were fighting the biggest battle of the day...installing the goddamn hardware. We worked for more than an hour figuring out how this system worked. It didn't take us long to get the door opened. The problem came from when we tried to engage the triple locking system and key lock. When you pull the handle up it's supposed to engage the deadbolt and the bolts that go into the top and bottom frame. I think we put the hardware together and took it apart 15 times when we realized we couldn't engage the triple locking system unless the door was closed (doh!). The completion of the hardware installation at about 5:30 PM finished day 1.
Sunday morning my father and I went to work installing the screens. We fought through what could arguably be the worst installation document I've ever seen (Note to window vendors, "Don't outsource the creation of the documentation to offshore workers!!!"). Not only did the documentation not explain what the components were, it was filled with typos. At one point it was telling us to look at the another section of the "installation instrucitons". A few paragraphs later we were told to "slid the hold washer" and then not to "adjust the sweep so that is contacts the sill but does nto interfere with the closeing of the screen". This was after we had to go to a dictionary to figure out what the instructions meant by "installing the astragal" (What the f*ck is an astragal?). It turns out an astragal is a piece of molding that covers the gap between doors. Of course we wouldn't have been confused if it showed a picture of what the friggin thing was. They took the time to draw us pictures of a hammer and tape measure but nooo we can't get a picture of an astragal. We also had an issue with the installation of the "sweeps". As it stands right now we didn't install the sweeps because what the instructions told us made it so the doors didn't close properly. After several hours we got the screens in place and they look really good.
We did a little more framing and as we stand right now the wall is ready for it's inspection. I have a time-lapse movie of the entire process that I will post after I run it through an editing process. Look for that later this week.
For now you can check out the pictures of the process and result
here.
