Doors – Door replacement – will door still be solid after cutting

doorsrepair

I need to replace/repair a door in my rented apartment. During a rather rowdy party one of my guests managed to put a hole in my bathroom door.

enter image description here

I don't think that there is probably anyway to repair the door cleanly. (If you look carefully I drilled a whole in the broken in piece and tried to pull it back out). I think that the easiest solution is going to be replacing the door. (Please let me know if there are any suggestions).

The dimensions of the door are somewhat strange. The door is 74'' tall and 28'' wide.

I cannot find a 74'' x 28'' door anywhere. The closest thing that I can find is 78'' x 28'.

I am thinking I will buy a similar door and cut off the bottom (or have it cut off at home depo). I am concerned that it is not going to be solid after being cut. Here is a diagram:

  ^      ============     ^
  |      ||        ||     |
  |      ||        ||     |
  |      ||        ||     |
74''     ||        ||    78''
  |      ||        ||     |
  |      ||        ||     |
  v      |---cut----|     |
         ||        ||     |
         ============     v

I was planning on using this kind of door:

enter image description here

Best Answer

On numerous occasions I have had to cut hollow core doors off more than the available blocking in the top / bottom of the door. What I have done in these instances is to take the cut off bottom piece and then reclaimed the inner block for re-use. If a table saw is available it is quick work to set the fence just right so that a couple of rip direction passes cleanly cuts off the outer laminations. Alternatively the laminations can be removed using a plane.

Once the block is nicely cleaned up it can be glued and slipped right up into the open bottom of the door. Use a couple of 1x4 boards on either side of the door and some good sized C-Clamps to tighten up the glue joint so that the glue can dry without any gaps.

Note that often the inside of hollow core doors has an internal webbing of cardboard material to bridge the gap between the two lamination skins of the door. Sometimes it is necessary to use a chisel inside the cut open bottom of the door to scrape back the glue joint of this web material on the laminated panel. If this is not smoothed out the re-claimed bottom block will make the laminated sides bulge out when trying to glue the block in place.

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