Giving New Life to an Old Door

Many homes around Erie have a half basement with a crawlspace, including ours; and most of the time, the door leading to the crawl space is no bigger than 24"x24". Like most homeowners in Erie who have a crawl space, we use ours for storage. Unlike most home in Erie, our builder separated our basement from our crawl space with a non-load bearing partition wall and stapled single side facing vapor radiant barrier. Basically aluminum foil with paper on the back. That vapor barrier lasted 12-years until we moved in... with cats. Those furry little demons had a field day with that vapor barrier and tore it apart.

Since we use that area for storage, I had wanted to create a large opening and add a larger door. Not wanting to make the door out of plywood, I had wanted to reuse a 6-panel door that we had. Unfortunately, the 6-panels would be in the wrong place when the door was cut to size. So the project stalled.

A few weeks ago, I was working on a rental property in Country Fields. The previous tenants were a little rough on the property and a door needed to be replaced in the basement due to a fist hole and hole in the base that a dog created. If possible, I like to send reusable home materials to ReSource in Boulder, but this door was shot so it went to the landfill. I found another no panel door in the garage and also planned to send it to the landfill since it was poorly repaired, but then I thought about my crawlspace.

Besides the bottom of the door being "repaired" with wood putty, the rest of the door was fine. Though it did not match the rest of the doors in our home (no panels vs 6-panels), it would be in the basement that has no other doors. It just needed to be cut to size, but since it was a hollow core door, internal framing material would need to be added, once the door was cut. Having done this before (I turned our old backdoor into a shed door), I already had a game plan.

In order for the lock handle to line up where I wanted it, both the top and bottom needed to be cut-off.  Internal framing was added, new hinge cutouts were made, the old hinge cutout was patched, the door faces were sanded in preparation for paint, and the door was installed. I had also created a 3/8" ABS (plastic) threshold to smooth out the bottom framing of the door. In the end, this 30"x80" door became a 30"x44" door for our crawlspace. It still needs to be painted, and the vapor barrier needs to be removed and replaced with something more feline vermin proof; but the door issue has been addressed. Total cost... $0 out of pocket and a few hours of time.