Interior doors with a box - how to choose

If you yourself are engaged in repair and choose finishing materials, you will have a lot to think about how to choose the door with the box. This article will help you decide, as well as properly prepare openings for the installation of interior doors and even install the box yourself.

Choosing the interior door

Appearance, design and material from which it is made are those parameters, the choice of which depends only on you or your designer. Here we will discuss what the size of the doors should be, so that you don’t have to redo them and customize them for ready-made openings.

It should be noted that the doors with the box already finished and fitted in size are most often supplied by foreign manufacturers and are expensive. More budget options come in the form of a designer, consisting of a door leaf and bars, of which the box must be assembled independently on site. You can purchase the canvas without the box, but in this case, the self-installation of the door will be very difficult.

Standard sizes (see the parameters of interior doors) are respected by most domestic and foreign manufacturers. Their height, as a rule, is 2000 mm, and width - 600, 700 or 800 mm, depending on the purpose of the room in which they will be installed. Doors of greater width are usually placed at the entrance to the apartment.

The size of the box depends directly on the size of the door. In turn, the opening should have such dimensions that the entire structure fits easily into it. With a noticeable discrepancy between these parameters, it is necessary either to change (widen or narrow) the opening, or to order non-standard doors, which inevitably leads to an increase in the cost of repairs.

If your house has high ceilings, to maintain the proportions, it is advisable to install higher doors than provided by the standards. In this case, you also will not be able to avoid the additional costs of manufacturing doors and boxes according to your dimensions.

Therefore, the choice of interior doors with boxes should be made in advance, even at the stage of rough work and the construction of partitions. Anyway, you need to know what size each room will have in order to calculate the proper size of the openings for them.

Determine the dimensions of the openings

Having decided which doors you want to install in your home, take care to fit the openings in the supporting walls and partitions. Or, if the expansion in the carrier wall is not possible, adjust your plans.

Having information about what doors you will have - dimensions with a box - the builders will be able to immediately build the necessary openings by erecting metal profiles at a certain distance during the erection of plasterboard partitions. It will not be difficult to keep the specified dimensions when building walls of bricks, concrete blocks and other materials.

It is more difficult to align existing ones with the necessary parameters. But if this is not done, it is likely that the door with the box will not enter the opening or repair after installation will have to be redone, eliminating large gaps between the box and the wall, pasting wallpaper or painting the walls.

What you need to know to calculate the openings?

Need to know:

• The height and width of the door leaf

• Width and thickness of door frames
• The width of the trim that will frame the door
• The height of the threshold, if necessary.

For reference:

Thresholds are usually installed on entrance doors to prevent heat leakage. But they should also be used for the doors to the bathrooms to protect living rooms from accidental leaks.

Knowing all these data, it is easy to calculate the parameters of the opening. For example, consider the following standard: box size - 25 mm thickness and 40 mm width; the size of a cloth is 800х2000 mm.

Adding to the width of the double box thickness and dimensions of the mounting gap, which is usually 15 mm on each side, you get the width of the opening: 800 + 2x15 + 2x25 = 880 mm. If the platbands are of sufficient width, then this size may be slightly larger - the gap between the wall and the box will be closed by a platband.

To calculate the height of the opening, it is necessary to take into account the height of the threshold, and if there is none, then the size of the gap between the bottom of the door and the clean floor.

Attention! Be sure to device gaps of 5-10 mm in size in the lower part to ensure air exchange. If the house is supplied with liquefied gas, then for kitchen doors the gap increases to 15-20 mm for ventilation.

So, the height of the opening, into which the chosen door with the box without threshold will be installed (see Thresholds for interior doors), is calculated as follows: 2000 + 25 +15 + 10 = 2050 mm.

It is desirable to add to the data obtained the size of the gap that must be left between the door leaf and the box, but since it is only a few millimeters, it can also be ignored in rough calculations.

A few words about why we need data on the width of the box. The fact is that the installation is possible only in the opening of the appropriate thickness. If it is smaller than the width of the box, then the latter will have to be cut along so that it does not protrude beyond the plane of the wall.

And this inevitably leads to a deterioration in quality and appearance. In addition, not all boxes can be subjected to such a rough adjustment. If the thickness of the opening exceeds the width of the box, it will be necessary to take care of the purchase of supplies.

Install the door frame

If the main repair work has come to an end, the doors are bought (the dimensions with the box correspond to the openings), and there is no extra money left or you simply do not want to wait for the master, then you can install the box yourself (see How to assemble the door frame without problems). After that, hang them is not difficult.

Assembling the door box as follows:

1. Lay the vertical bars of the box on a flat, clean floor with the anchors up and put in the door leaf. Between the ends of the blade and the anvils, insert pieces of packing cardboard or strips of hardboard to provide clearance. Align the upper ends of the bars with the top of the canvas.
2. Attach the top bar to the ends of the vertical bars., align it with one of the racks and mark the length of the crossbar along the edge of the second rack with a pencil. Then saw off the excess with a hacksaw or jigsaw.
3. Attach the crossbar to the racks again and make marks on the inner sides on the mock part.. On the porch of the crossbar, make cuts using the hacksaw, using a hacksaw, to make the cut even and neat. Cleave the excess wood and clean this place with a chisel.
4. Drill holes in the crossbar with a thin drill. and fasten it to the posts with self-tapping screws.

Attention! The described sequence of works is applicable only for doors, the gates of the boxes of which have a rectangular cross section. To assemble a box with a complex curved section, the racks and the crossbar must be cut at a 45-degree angle.

1. Saw the rack of the box in height, taking into account the gap between the floor and the bottom of the canvas. In this case, note that the box should not stand on the floor, it is fixed at a height of 1-2 mm from a clean floor to provide him with moisture and thermal expansion.
2. Install the box in the opening, fixing it with wedges, and align the rack and the crossbar level in two planes. To make sure the installation is correct, measure the diagonals - they must be equal.
3. After fitting the door leaf, fix the box in the opening with anchor bolts.

You need to hang the door, put the trim and feel the pride of the perfect job.