Tying together old & new in entryway woodwork, part 1

Helping install a chimney wasn't the only thing my dad helped us do when he was here a couple weeks ago.  We couldn't let him off that easily. We also managed to tackle trim restoration and installation in the entryway.

Some of the trim in this room was pretty desperate.  We did some damage when we turned a window into an outside door, but much of the desperation preceded us by about 30 years when someone else turned a different window into the door to the addition.  The resulting trim was so hideously mismatched in both profile and finish that it must have really pissed off the resident cat, Munchkins, because he spent the next 10 years scratching the living daylights out of it. Oh yeah, and of course there was a hollow-core door, which must have been really embarrassed facing a room with four other original, unpainted, old-growth Douglas fir doors.  Fast forward to when we move in - I am so horrified by these injustices that I impulsively paint the outside trim Summer Harvest to blend in with the walls, and the inside of the door frame light blue, the same color as the trim inside the addition.

Here's the best I could find for a before picture - shortly after we moved in, my dad came over and helped us replace the hollow core door with one we had taken down from elsewhere.  We never actually lined up the knob and strike plate, so the door didn't actually close, per se.

After gutting the room, drywalling, painting, etc., it came time to put some trim back up.  Thanks to the doors that have been removed between this room and the living room, as well as between the dining room and the kitchen, we had a surplus of original door trim pieces to recycle around this door and the one to the outside.  However, if we had only reused the trim, we'd still have to strip the blue paint off the inside of the frame, realign the strike plate, etc.  While staring at this for a long time, trying to figure out a course of action, my dad and I came up with a waaaay better idea: just replace the whole darned thing with the entire door - frame and hardware included - that we just took out between this room and the living room.  A trip to the basement to retrieve the frame and a trip to the attic to retrieve the door (long ago removed from its hinges) yielded all the necessary parts.

Badda bing badda boom!

Wow!  A door that matches and closes! Who woulda thunk it! And I swear the time it took to install it wasn't much longer than the time it took to write about it.  Perfect.

The trim, of course, wasn't quite that easy...the only top pieces we had that were wide enough to go over a 32" door had had their corners hacked off in order to be jammed up against walls in their previous installations.  However, a little digging in the basement trim stash yielded something amazing.  My camera would never have picked it up, but I found an unfinished piece of the top molding with the word "extra" written on the back in pencil.  It must have been left here by Fred and Frank, the original carpenters who had a penchant for signing things, and saved by each subsequent owner.  I LOVE using up that kind of stuff.  A couple of mitre cuts and a little glue later, here's the result:

You can barely see it, right?  Good.  That's the idea. Trust me, it's a lot better.  And nobody notices we did anything.  Dad almost broke out in hives to install the old trim along the sides of the door with old paint slopped all over it, but I gently convinced him that I couldn't wait any longer and that I promise to refinish it someday.  He compromised by installing it with a minimum of tiny brass finishing screws, which will come out easily.  Someday.