Door Switcheroo

We've had an issue with our bedroom door. We have complained about it, whined about it and we have finally done something about it. Here was the issue

As you can see, if you opened the door into the bedroom, the door completely blocked the light switch to the room. This may seem like a benign issue, but let me tell you, it was annoying. It was made worse by the fact that are bedroom door is significantly wider than a normal door so you felt like you were doing a lot of work to just turn on the lights. Now, Nate theorizes that when they put this addition on the house, the contractors decided that it wasn't worth their time to do what we were about to do. This made me think this was going to be a longish process...

First thing we did was take the door off it's hinges and take the hinges off. Here is what the door looked like at this point.

Since just flipping the door and attaching the hinges to the other side of the door frame would have raised the door knob to an awkward level, we decided to switch the side of the door the hinges attached to. In order to do this, we had to chisel out the remaining hinge area so that they would fit. (Tip from Nate: Keep the flat part of the chisel up so that if you slip, you won't gouge out whatever you're working on... also, go with the grain of the wood)

While I worked on chiseling, Nate traced out where the hinges needed to go on the other side of the door frame.

Here is what the door looked like post chiseling.

We, and by we I mean Nate, drilled out a hole so the latch would still latch.

Then Nate chiseled out the new hinge areas on the door frame...

We attached the hinges to the door and lined them up to the door frame and attached the hinges to the frame....

And we had a door that opened the correct way!

The last step was switching the door knob around so that it would latch the correct way (you figure out if you've forgotten to do this quickly when you try to slam the door to admire your work and it comes right back at you)

We spent about an hour doing this.... that's right 1hr. Can you say lazy contractors???

We thought we might reach for the wrong side of the door a couple of times out of habit, but not once... It is so natural that the door would open this way.