On Sun, 15 May 2011 20:14:47 -0400, Nate Nagel wrote:
The old door measured 29-7/8" wide. The new door (Jeld-Wen) brand
measured almost 30-1/4" wide.

Hmm, I thought the Jen-weld ones are normally clearly marked with the
dimensions & rough opening? All their exterior ones that I've seen have
been, anyway - perhaps the interiors are different.

On the upside, while the old busted door appeared to have the outside
frame made of MDF, the new Jeld-Wen door, despite having the same flimsy
(understatement of century) facing, used real pine for the structure.

Yeah, I think they're engineered lumber rather than solid pine, but it's
still a bit better than MDF (what we used to call custard wood in NZ :-)

I've got a couple of Jen-weld exterior doors here; the first wasn't too
bad (in "you get what you pay for" terms, anyway) but the other was very
poorly assembled - I'm still kicking myself for ever loading it onto the
truck. I've never messed with their interior stuff, though - there are
probably less parts and therefore less to screw up :-)

I personally would have been tempted to spend the $$ and buy a real
solid pine paneled door, but then the doors in the rest of the house
would have looked like **** in comparison...

Most of our interior ones are solid and well-built, with big old pinned
hinges on them and those nice old latches that take the huge keys, but
there's a complete mixture of four-panel and three-panel ones. At some
point I want to learn how to make my own so that I can make them all look
the same (and hopefully someone makes reproduction latch assemblies,
because they're all getting pretty worn now)

cheers

Jules