How To Replace A French Door Threshold

Measure the bottom of the.

How to replace a french door threshold.

Open your french doors and prop them fully open. Take the old gasket to a home improvement center or hardware store and buy an exact replacement. Protect your floors with a drop cloth before you begin and make sure you re comfortable with basic carpentry skills. Installing a new threshold and sill will take between two and three hours.

Cut the new threshold to fit using a jigsaw or circular saw. The new threshold arrived in good shape with all the hardware included. Adjust and perfect the cuts with a handsaw if necessary. First i measured the old threshold in place.

You don t want to damage the ends of the door stops. Preparing the new threshold. Wiggle the ends away from the jambs if you can or split them with a hammer and chisel and take them out piece by piece. Step 1 removing the door.

The threshold will have to have notches on each side to fit around the door jambs. Before you begin to do any work on the threshold itself you will have to remove the door which it holds. Replacing a threshold with a new aluminum one is fairly simple. Use a carpenter s square to mark perfect right angles for these notches.

Use patience and finesse not brute force. I had been unnecessarily worried about it after reading some of the amazon reviews. An interior threshold simply rests on the floor with no sill under it. Many aluminum thresholds have rubber strips that flex when the door is closed to provide a tighter seal.

Start to finish 3 hrs. Carefully remove the threshold from the opening. Use an old chisel or screwdriver to pry out the splines that hold the gasket in place if there are splines and then pry up the gasket and pull it out of its groove. French doors can be unscrewed in sections undoing the hinges and then removing the sliding wheels which allow the door to move backward and forward.

Stick a flat bar aka pry bar between the threshold and the subsill and pry up the center section.