Problematic door

[giglet]

My house is 110 years old, so it's something of a miracle that many of the walls and floors are still straight and at right angles with each other.

The door that's causing me problems is not one of those. It's original to the house, a panel door with cross-pieces at the top, middle, and bottom. It doesn't fit easily into its frame anymore because at some point the glue at the top joints came loose and it opened up some -- and then someone painted over it. So it's about an inch wider at the top than at the bottom. The doorframe is not square either. I'm not entirely sure that the doorframe isn't a structural element holding up the walls.

The latch and doorknob were part of a mortise lock assembly, and a piece of that broke.

So I have choices. Should I:
1) replace the mortise lock and plane the door to fit into the doorframe gracefully? (Possibly the least work.)
2) Buy a new door and cut it to the nonstandard and nonrectangular size?
3) Replace the door and doorframe. (Also possibly the least amount of work.)
4) Remove the door from the frame, strip the multiple layers of paint, knock it apart, and glue it back together the way it ought to be, install a new mortise lock, apply wood filler to the many and various dings, and try to rehang it?

I get the feeling that the last is the optimal solution, but also the most work.

Thoughts?

Comments

[sara]

From a conservation standpoint -- which I don't know if this door really deserves -- I would go for a combination of 1 and 4. E.g. strip as little as necessary to knock the thing back into functionality and plane it where you need to to make it shut gracefully, glue it back together with something non-expanding (a lot of these newfangled wonder glues expand a lot when you put them in wood; this is great when the wood is new but sub-ideal when it's not), install some kind of suitable mortise lock, give it a nice coat of paint to keep all the old lead paint from flaking off into your lungs, and hang it back up.

Skip the wood filler. There's not much point trying to make it look like a new door; it should look like an old door that's been well-maintained.

[giglet]

That sounds like good advice.

Do you know if Elmer's wood glue would be the right thing to use?

Re conservation: on one hand, it's a bathroom door from what was the servant's quarters and the bits were pretty clearly the cast-offs from downstairs. On the other hand. the cast-offs were pretty amazing, with dental work lintels and panelled doors and ornate molding.

I'm pretty impatient to have the door working again (it's the bathroom door), so I'm not sure I have the patience to do the right thing.

[sara]

Well, the traditional preservationist fix for that is hang up a tension rod with a curtain on it in your doorframe and leave your door out on sawhorses out back/in the shed/in the shop until you/the volunteers/the students get around to getting it done. *GRIN*

I think Elmer's wood glue would probably not be a bad choice, but you might have a poke around at your hardware store or Woodcraft or somewhere and talk to sales clerks, because a knowledgeable clerk is going to have better product-specific advice than I will. I would not recommend the Gorilla glues, I think those expand a lot (which I love for other stuff, don't get me wrong).

Frankly, if you've got original woodwork, chances are good it's going to be better-quality wood than what you can go out and buy today. Even my middle-class 1972 house, the original wood is umpteen times better than most everything you can get nowadays (so I have ended up painting a lot of it and leaving it where it is, because wow those dark 70s stains did NOT age well, blecch.)