Home renovation projects are easy to talk about and plan when an older house is involved, but when it comes down to actually doing the job things can get scary real quick.

Recently we had to install two new entrance doors on a house that was probably 60 years old. We wanted to install the doors complete with jam and threshold. These are called pre-hung doors. Where the problem lays is the rough opening. Doors back then were framed with several types of rough openings.

Some were too high for doors manufactured these days and most were framed several inches too short. In our case the front door was too high and the back door too low. We wanted an 84-inch opening, and in the front we had 85 inches and the back we had 78 inches. I guess the tall people were allowed in the front and the short people in the back.

Cutting down a door that is already in the jam is a time-consuming process. You have to disassemble the door jam and cut it down to the size you need. The same for the door; it needs to be cut down to fit into the new jam and reassembled all over again.

The new exterior metal doors pre-hung in jams also come with weather stripping that also needs to be cut down to fit. Another issue that crops up is the thickness of the wall that the door is installed in. With lath and plaster walls on the inside and several layers of siding on the outside the wall thickness can be just about anything.

In our case the front door was installed in a wall that was 71/2 inches thick, and — never to be outdone — the back door was incased in a wall that was 61/2 inches thick. The issue here is that pre-hung doors, these come sized for walls that were framed either with 2X4’s, 2X6’s or even 2X8’s. That translates to 31/2, 51/2 or 71/4 inches. You can see the basic trouble here.

It means that we have to custom manufacture trim to fit - to fit the extra place on the door jam so it will fit the width of the wall and also have a wider space to cover that is not the same on either side of the door, nor the same from front to back. Confusing, I know. It’s a good thing we have a portable table saw to cut all these crazy pieces.

Anyone that has completed a job large or small on an older house knows just what I’m talking about. They did things differently back in the day, and any changes we think we want, back in this day and age, can be a lot more involved than it would be on a house that is only 20 years old or so. Yes, it can be said that the houses are better built these days, but so is everything - better, more efficient and perhaps even cheaper. Bread costs more and so does a 2X4. It’s all relative to the time. Energy costs are another reason things were cheaper back then. It was cheap to heat your house, and they just didn’t know that newspaper wasn’t good enough to insulate voids around a door.

When we pulled the old doors out we found rolled up newspaper that was used to fill the gaps. The date on it was April 29, 1949. We can assume that the rest of the house has some sort of insulation that wouldn’t make the grade today, but for now we are only dealing with the doors. The new doors will not only be a pleasant addition to the old house but we will have eliminated the drafty door issue.

Older homes have similar issues with windows. Often we need to buy a custom size to fit into the opening because the windows nowadays just don’t fit. Whenever we have to install the finish trim around new doors and windows we find that a wider piece works well to cover up the extra place we are left with after all the modifications to the door and framing.

In the end it all looks great and every door and window now has a new modern wide trim to match the old wide baseboards around the whole house.

Gerry Frederick is in the renovation business in Cranbrook