The French Doors in the dining room

After removing the paneling ... And after installing the doors

And, finally, done:

When we moved in, you might say the dining room was a piece of work. The floor was carpeted and two walls were paneled, with most of the original trim gone. We removed the carpet and paneling and discovered a nasty gap in the flooring near the wall shared with the kitchen. As noted on two other pages (see below) we repaired the floor and covered the crack with cabinets. The cabinets are present in the right "before" image but absent in the left one. Presto! You can even see the crack in the floor in the left image.

The other paneled wall--the one shared with the back porch--had a set of windows six feet wide and about as tall. (See the left "before" image.) The house's only air conditioner, an enormous ugly steel box, was wedged into it and held in place with more ugly steel plates and bits of foam to "seal" the gaps. (The A/C unit was also plugged into the room's only electrical outlet--a 220V one--until we added more.) These windows were off-center from the archway across the room, and both were off-center from the cieling light fixture, which I moved last year. The old light is in the left image, and the new one in the right picture (which unfortunately doesn't do a good job of showing that the new light is centered on the door).

We had the windows removed. For the space, we bought a double French door and a transom-style window above it. We had a professional do the installation (centered on the archway), which included exterior trim but not interior. For the trim on the interior, I had nothing to put up, because the original woodwork was gone. It wasn't until a year later that I had some door/window molding custom milled, and stole some bits of baseboard from elsewhere in the house. So the French doors were installed and operating, but surrounded by bare framing and exposed plaster lath, for about a year. The right "before" image shows the situation immediately after installation--shortly thereafter, I put up some drywall to cover the big holes, and painted the wall.

I succeeded in trimming out the wall in two weekends. On the first weekend, I primed the door, doorframe, and the (unmounted) trim. The trim was very rough after painting and had to be sanded. I also used a table saw to cut strips of thin plywood; these extended the door's frame farther into the room, making up for the fact that it wasn't as thick as the wall. The next weekend, I spent Friday night painting the trim gloss white, then mounted it and caulked it Saturday, finally giving it its second coat of gloss white paint on Sunday. Along the way, the door and frame also got painted, and the baseboard cut, installed, and painted. But I have to admit that (as you can see in the "after" picture) I haven't yet reinstalled the crownmolding or put in a threshold. A lot of the carpentry was improvised, because nothing in this house is square, and the plaster is missing or not flat in a lot of places where I wanted a firm level surface.

All in all, the project cost less than $2000 to buy and install the door, then two weekends of work to trim out the inside. I consider it well worth it.

By a happy coincidence, the top of the door and transom is at approximately the same height as the tops of the archways above the cabinets we installed on the neighboring wall. I later put the same molding on the faces of those cabinets, to make them look like they're built into the wall rather than sitting in front of it.

Main page.
Home Improvement pages:
The living room window trim and paint.
The fireplace we had we had reconditioned to burn wood again.
The dining room floor repair and paint colors, and preparation for the cabinets.
A set of cabinets we installed in the dining room.
A set of French doors installed between our dining room and back porch.