Exterior Door Removal

[Music playing] Exterior door installation is not as hard as you might think. Hi I am Tim Carter from askthebuilder.com but before we install an exterior door we have got to take one out. Let us get started right now. The first step in my opinion to remove an exterior door is to start from the inside and remove the trim away from the door so you can see what you are up against. Okay I have got the trim off and I am ready to take the door out but before I do that, I want to stop and I want to take some measurements. Here is why. I want to ensure that the new door is the right size. Imagine the nightmare if you were to actually take this door out and then find out that the new door is either way too small or it is too big for the opening. We are ready to go. The new door is going to fit perfectly. Let us go take the other one out right now. It is time to take the exterior trim off. I am going to take two of the three pieces off. I am going to take off the two side pieces of trim but not the top piece and the reason that I do not want to take the top piece off is there is an integral flashing on top of the trim that goes back behind the siding and I can actually install the new door by tilting it backwards and bringing it up to the top piece of trim. So I am not taking off. Most of the time you are going to do the same thing, you might have to take the trim of all the way around the door or in certain rare instances, you might not have to take off any trim but I guarantee you, there is a really good chance you are going to be taken from trim off. One final tip, I am actually going to use a razor knife to slice through any caulking that might be between the side of the trim and the wood siding on the other side, that is really important. If you do not do that you will actually rip the siding apart so take your time with the razor knife and see if you cannot slice some of that caulk. Got a little problem here already, you can see that as I try to take this trim off, the siding is coming with it. So what I am going to do is actually tap the siding with a two by four block to try to break it loose from the trim board. Okay we have got the first piece to trim off. A little bit of damage, but we can repair it. So let us keep moving forward. That side came off a whole lot a user than the right side. We are getting really close to get this door out of the opening. Okay we have got the interior trim off. The exterior trim, now to make it a little easier, let us get some of the way off this system and of course that means just simply take the door off the hinges so the only thing that is left is actually the door jam and in my case the sidelights. So let us just simply pop the door off the hinges. I am just going to simply remove the hinge pins so I can lift the door off the hinges and carry it outside. The door is off the hinges, we are ready to take the jam out and finish the job. But as I was removing the door, I remembered that this door has got an alarm system and there is switch that is up in the jam here that is hardwired and if just rip the jam out, I could damage the wiring. So I now have to carefully cut away the dry wall, find the wires to the alarm system and cut them so that I can reinstall that switch in the new door. Now that the wires are cut to the alarm system, there is really only one last thing to do. Cut away the nails that are holding the door to the rough jam. I like to use a saw zaw for that purpose and I have got a special aggressive blade that not only will cut wood, it will also cut the thin metal of the nails that are holding the jam in place. Sometimes you have got to use the persuader to get that door out. It can be a little tight sometimes but it looks like the door is going to tilt in right now and we are basically already done with the job. Okay you know what? It looks like I have got this door out and the problem is sometimes they can be a little unwieldy and you might need an extra hand. I am Tim Carter for askthebuilder.com. Kathy, I need some help. [Music playing]