Daily Home Renovation Tips

In Part 1 we examined different examples of what an unfinished new door frame installation can look like. Here, in Part 2 we review what tools and materials we used for the finishing.

Three of the tools we are going to use are shown below:

The tool in the yellow and black packaging is called a Nail Set. It’s purpose is to allow one to use a hammer to drive the exposed nail head beneath the surface of the wood. Did you know that this device comes in different sizes? I didn’t it. The one we decided to use is a 1/ 32 size as the finishing nails used to install the door jam onto the new door frame were very small.

There are larger sizes, for example 1/16. However, you want to get one that is smaller than the size of the nail head. If you use one that is larger than the nail head you will be sure to also damage some of the wood as you are attempting to drive the nail beneath the wood surface.

We had a very small hammer and decided to use it against the nail set to drive the exposed finishing nails. We were very concerned that since we are not professionals, likely we would mis-hit the nail set and drive holes in the wood rather than sink the exposed nails. We took our time and very slowly and gently  tapped with increasing strength the nail set against the exposed finishing nails so they were beneath the wood surface with only one small damage occuring from a mis-hit which drove the nail set off of the nail and directly into the wood door jam.

Now, how do we cover the holes from the sunken finishing nails? We thought that we might use the same paint-able caulking which we used for other areas of the renovation. However, the product shown in the picture above, the wood filler is superior than caulking. The reason is that the wood filler will dry very hard, not so the caulking. Therefore, once the nail hole is filled, you still need to use sandpaper to remove the excess filling material before painting so the existence of the nail hole is not visible. Have you ever tried to use sandpaper against caulking? Doesn’t work very well because caulking does not dry rigid.

Wood filler comes in a variety of colours. We choose white to match the paint we would be using to make the filled nail hole less visible. At first the wood filler came out very loose, as loose as the first ketchup from a low quality ketchup bottle that had not been used in a while which was surprising.

While we had never personally used wood filler we did not expect this. When we applied it, it did not harden. Only once we applied more wood filler material from the same bottle did the texture become more thick as we had anticipated. We applied the wood filler directly from the tube not only to the exposed finishing nail holes but also to the holes above the door hinges caused by the initial attempt at installing the door to the frame.

We smoothed any excess wood filler with our finger. We could have also used a putty knife which may have left a smoother finish, but we didn’t have one and I didn’t feel like having to explain to other residents of the house why there was wood filler on a kitchen knife. :-)  Be sure to have a paper towel handy to wipe off the excess wood filler from your fingers just as you would to wipe off excess caulking from your fingers. This wood filler stuff dries pretty quick so don’t answer any phones that might ring while you are doing this.

In our next post we will finish the finishing for the new door frame.