I have two kiddos in rooms next to each other with a walk-in closet between them. There's a bathroom between them too which made this project make sense for more than just the two of them. Confused? I understand. I'll make it make more sense.
My kids decided that they wanted to turn the walk-in closet into a podcast/youtube video studio and they wanted to share it. The existing doorway into it was in my son's room. They wanted another door into it installed in my daughter's room on the other side. It would end up being a Jack and Jill closet/studio. I started by marking the studs on either side of where the door would go. There's an outlet there that I had to work around so the door had to be pushed at least that far into the room.
My favorite tool is my oscillator. It's great to use for jobs like this because your cuts can be really precise.
This is when I asked one more time if they really wanted this to happen because there was about to be a giant hole in the wall. They like to make decisions before really thinking and excitedly said yes! Here's where I will explain why I'm okay with installing a door in this room. On our upper floor, we have a couple of bedrooms on one side and a couple on the other side of a very long bathroom. At the end of that bathroom is the closet between the bedrooms. The entire length of both is 20'. The closet is only 4' so that's a 16' long bathroom. It's a bit silly. Some day, I'd like to eat up the closet and split the entire 20' up into two bathrooms with this bedroom having an ensuite. At that point, I would close it off from the room on the other side. I will have to add a new closet to the other room since the closet that currently belongs to it is being repurposed by this project. Anyway, here's the full 20' length of that wall with a 16' bathroom on the far end and then a 4' closet on the near side.
Does it make more sense now? I hope so. The next step was to cut through the closet drywall. Actually, before that, I pulled some of the fixtures out of the closet but that didn't really need picture proof.
This is the stage where I would have installed a door but I didn't have one yet. The kids knew this and still pushed for the opening. They wanted a desk built before anything else.
I helped my kids move their stuff in and set things up for use and then immediately started looking for a door. I wasn't sure I would find anything close to what I wanted but I got lucky pretty quickly at a Restore in our town. I found a pre-hung, solid wood door, the same style as the rest of the doors in our house, with trim! It was a near perfect size and opened the way I wanted it too as well.
I was in a hurry to put the door up and forgot to bring my phone in with me to take pictures so I'll just explain the process with a copy of the before picture, for reference. Before installing a door, you need to create a structure to keep things safe and sound. First, I cut out the middle stud to the height of the door I bought. Then I cut the bottom 2 x 4 out of the way and pushed the middle stud to the side. Then I had to cut another stud the same height and put it in on the other side. Then, I reused the bottom 2 x 4 and placed it on top of the new side pieces. Basically, I reused two 2 x 4s and cut one new one to build a rectangle around where the door would go. The upper 2 x 4 needs to rest on top of the side 2 x 4s in order for the opening to be strong within the structure of the wall.
The door was slightly smaller than the width of the frame I created so I had to add some bracing. There was a gap between the door and the drywall so I tacked on an extra piece of trim in the interim between getting the door in and doing the finishing touches.
When I had time for the finishes, I cut and reused the drywall that I took down when prepping for the door to fill in the rest of the hole. Drywall mud went on to fill the smaller gaps and I finished installing the trim.
When the drywall mud was dry, I added spray-on texture, then paint.
Voila! Door in wall.
Comments