If you're looking for way to improve the overall decor of your home and increase visual space at the same time, you may be interested in interior French doors. Interior French doors are twice the size of regular doors and contain two separately opening doors hinged at opposite sides. This allows the individual doors to swing in or out from the center of the entire set. Because these doors contain transparent or glazed panels, they will open up a room and diffuse natural light all throughout an otherwise closed, stuffy environment.

Installing

As long as you have the space, you can install interior French doors. Most people use them as an entryway into a garden, patio, or living room.

The easiest way to install interior French doors is to purchase them pre-hung or pre-assembled. That way all you really have to do slide them into their frames, shim them, and screw them in.

Prepare Your Journey

To begin, make sure you have the following materials:

Positioning Your Entryway

Assuming that you have your doorframe prepped and you have your interior French doors out of its box and ready to insert:

(1) Position the bottom of the interior French doors in the middle of the frame
(2) Lift it (tilt it) into a fitting position

You may have to do a little repositioning to ensure that the set of interior French doors is vertical to the floor that it sits on (otherwise called, "plumb").

Once you're pretty confident of its position, hold the interior French doors in place while by doing a little preliminary screw work. Insert a few screws into the interior French doors: two on top to hold all its weight and once on the bottom in the middle.

Checking For A Secure Fit

The interior French doors should be secure enough for you to let go of it and inspect progress thus far.

Walk around the door and look for gaps around latch and hinge areas. Should you find any, insert shims (thin wedges of wood) into these gaps and then use a level to make sure your efforts either keep the interior French doors plumb or they make the interior French doors plumb.

You also want to make sure that the corners of the interior French doors are square. If not, you need to shim them until they are square.

Insulate the gap between the doorframe and the 2 x 4s studs that support it. And then finally, nail on the door trim.

Making A Personal Statement

If the glass inside your interior French doors are rather plain and you'd like something a little more visually interesting to look through, you can have each window pain professionally etched or you can buy a kit and etch them yourself. Using a variety of stencils, you can etch any kind of design onto each pane - ranging from delicate floral scenes to modern geometric patterns.

See Also:

Sliding Interior Doors