The living space, or mother-in-law suite, that we created for grandma is just the rear portion of the finished basement. To give her a bit more privacy, we decided to give her a door. There's a hallway that leads to her space so it wasn't totally necessary but it's always nice to be able to close yourself away from the rest of the family.
Here's the view from her space, looking back down the hallway.
I measured the opening and decided on a door that would fit without the need for any framework. I started off by removing parts of the baseboards so that the door could sit flush with the walls.
There was about an inch of space to fill on the sides of the door that I bought so I just attached a piece of strapping to one side of the hallway. I chose the side where the hinges would go to make sure there was enough clearance to be able to open the door fully.
The only difficult part about hanging a door is getting everything plumb so that the door opens and closes properly and the door latch hits the hole on the frame. If the latch doesn't fit, the door can't be held closed. It was pretty tricky getting the door into place and attaching it while checking for plumb over and over again. What made it even more tricky was the fact that there is nothing plumb about this finished basement. When you stand at the end of the hall, looking into grandma's place, you can see a curve in the length of the wall. It's not 90 degrees from the floor or ceiling either. Thankfully, when you find that something isn't plumb or the door isn't hanging nicely, you can just pull a screw out, adjust the frame and then put the screw back in. Obviously, that's not the case if you chose to hang your door with nails. I prefer using screws because it's a more forgiving method.
One thing I wasn't sure of until I got the door in place was what kind of trim work I could attach around it. There wasn't much room but I found some pieces that make it look nicer. On the sides I used concave corner pieces.
On the top, I used two door stop pieces attached together at 90 degrees.
Trying to attach trim pieces to the door surround made it even more obvious how bad the walls are. Hopefully caulk and paint will help. We're thinking white trim and a yellow door. Yellow should look really nice with the fancy black door handle.
For now, grandma can escape a little more completely from the chaos of the rest of the house!
Now, where's my caulk gun?
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