I am trying to put some casings around a couple of doors, something I have done many times. However, I have run into something that I am not sure how to deal with, and I was looking for suggestions.
I have a wall which is not plumb, out about 1/2 or 3/4 from top to bottom. I installed the door, and it is plumb. The result is that the door jamb is pretty well flush with the sheetrock at the top of the doorway, but runs in 1/2 or maybe 3/4 by the bottom. When the casing is lined up across the two surfaces, it’s enough of a runout that while the top looks fine, I end up with a very noticeable gap at the bottom. I can roll the casing so that it sits well on one surface or the other, but not both. The casing does not have enough flex to bend across the two surfaces.
So far, the best I can come up with is to mill down the bottom 1/3 of the casing on the high-surface side, but I don’t think any of the tools I have will do that without it looking poor. I have the usual stuff, table saw, miter saw, chsiels, sawzall… OK, probably not that last one. I could try to use the dado to that effect, but I am not sure if that’s going to give a nice clean mating surface.
My attempts to google yielded nothing, but that’s probably because I don’t really even know how to phrase the question.
Do you have a block plane? It’ll take a little elbow grease, but you should be able to scribe a line along the side of the trim and then scrape it down.
You can plane it as friedo suggests. I had to do this to a door frame. It won’t take long, but it’ a lot faster if you have a hand-held power planer. You could also use drywall compound to built up the wall, but that will be more trouble than it’s worth unless the walls are still unpainted.
This is what I would do: install the casing flat to the wall, so that you have the gap between the casing and the door at the bottom, as you have described. Then I would make a custom piece of wood on my table saw, using a tapering jig, to fit in the gap. It doesn’t have to be exactly perfect, but it does need to fit in there to fill in most of the space. Anything it doesn’t fill you can spackle. Once it’s sanded and painted it will look great.
Roddy
(bolding mine)
As friedo suggested, and Tripolar (and I, second) this would be an easy ‘fix’. John Mace also has a good idea, that I’ve used to good effect.
A picture would help a lot in determining the best method to use.
Seems to me you are adding a casing, as you are adding a door.
The door frame is a prefab thing, but they flex a little so the builder can straighten it up when installing it. SInce there was no door going in at first, they didn’t straight it up… Maybe they get bent door frames cheaper…
No matter, you don’t have to adjust the pre-fab frame if the door can fit in as it is.
Its only the jamb that might have to be removed.
If it exists already, you can remove it… Perhaps remove only one side, the side that is not vertical. Maybe you have to remove both.
Then (re)install the jamb(s) with spacers, temporaily, and put the door in, to verify the door jam is a nice rectangle ! Adjust the spacers ,eg by hammering in wedge shapes and moving them up and down to the correct place. You’ll sort it.
Then attach the door jam permanently, so that the spaces are permanent too.
Now put the purely decorative casing… it covers up the ugly work you put in betweem the prefab and the jam.
Thanks for all the suggestions. The block plane was just the ticket. I actually have a pretty nice one, but I use it so rarely that it didn’t even occur to me.
I ended up taking the 50/50 approach. Since the runout was significant, I took 1/2 from the sheetrock and 1/2 from the moulding. I marked the line of the molding’s edge on the sheetrock and used a razor to remove the paper from that area. I then used a putty knife to carefully scrape that down a bit. I marked off the corresponding space on the back of the moulding and used the plane to take that down. The result looks pretty good, and will be easily concealed with a little caulk.
