door-framedoors
We have an old house (100+ years) with original door frames. The top hinge on one door has come away from the door frame – the wood is split and soft, so the screws have no bite.
I'm thinking the best way to fix this, short of ripping out the whole door frame, would be to drill out the split wood, chisel it square, then glue in a new piece of wood for the hinge to be screwed into.
Is this a wise move or is there a better way?
You may be OK if you use proper anchors. I assume this is drywall. The shower door shouldn't be that heavy but you certainly don't want a bunch of glass raining down on someone. It would probably be a good idea to put a stud if you still don't feel the anchors will work for you.
Before you get started carefully evaluate if you really really want to have a pair of doors that swing out 18" into the room. In many bedrooms this is likely to be a less than desirable thing to have. If you are having a hard time visualizing what this would be like then you should get some large cardboard boxes and make up a fake set of the doors and duct tape them in place for a few days. Then with normal usage of the room you can swing the fake doors open and shut to see if the 18" interference is a pain or not.
Do not try to install the door hardware right on the top of the drywall. You will indeed regret doing that sooner as opposed to later.
The really correct way to do this is to remove the banding drywall material. (This will likely be more work than first guess because there is highly likely to be metal corner pieces installed on each corner of the opening). You would also remove the banding drywall at the upper side of the opening along with any previous door track hardware. Then you would fit in new boards to make a proper jamb for the doors. These will want to 3/4" thickness and not the 0.5" thickness that you proposed. Proper door fitting will demand that there be a small gap between the jamb and the exposed stud faces. The gap is used to allow the adjustment of the jamb opening so that it is perfectly square and plumb. Tapered wood wedges in the opening help to wedge the frame one way or another.
After the jamb is in place the trim is installed across the gap to bridge over the space from the jamb out over the drywall.
You should also plan for installing door stop molding which gives an edge for the doors to close against.
Door Comparison
I've added a couple of pictures to my answer to show the advantage of bi-fold doors in terms of how they project out into the room less than full swing doors. First off you would want to use a pair of bi-fold doors per opening for optimum usage. The second point is that the pivot point for bi-fold doors can often be recesed into the opening which lessens the projection distance into the room. The latter comment would also apply to a single bi-fold door application as well.
I can appreciate the fact that bi-fold doors use up some of the opening width. For your most often used closets you may want to consider the possibility to widen the opening which of course is not a trivial project. But then what is the price of convenience.
Also closets with deep blind ends are indeed a pain to make use of. Often it can be advantageous to re-fit the closet pole in such closets so that they go across from the front to back of the space at the ends so it is easier to take hung garments in and out.
Best Answer
Since you say that the wood under the hinge and around the hinge screw holes has split and gone soft it pays to check the wood of the door jamb adjacent to the hinge mount location as well. If the wood there is not sound then you are likely looking forward to some more serious repair such as replacement of the jamb side board or the whole jamb.
If the adjacent wood is still in good condition it may be possible to cut out the the piece under the hinge plate and replace it with a new block of wood. Edge gluing of the block of wood into place will require a very close tolerance fit and ability to clamp it into place to get the strongest joint possible. The best side for the wood to bond well with the new piece is along the grain so make sure the insert piece has the same grain orientation as the jamb. Then you can clamp across the jamb and to do so it would be necessary to remove the casing trim along the hinge side.
I would not drill out and chisel the the opening to shape as it would be a lot of work to get the tolerance necessary for a decent wood glue bond to the insert piece. Instead I would use an oscillating multi-function power tool similar to that pictured below. Using the plunge cutting blade like the middle one pictured it would be easy to cut out the damaged piece from the jamb with nice straight and square cuts.
Once you have the new piece glued in place and you go to remount the hinge make sure to drill appropriate pilot holes for the hinge screws so as to avoid splitting the insert wood piece.