Replace Doors Or Floors First

In new construction homes where no flooring has been laid yet this is the way it works.

Replace doors or floors first.

Then you should paint all trim and doors first the floors go in last. I love my doors which were installed today but since the floors were installed first i now have a gap or two where the new frame doesn t cover the flooring. After floors are in fenish with quarter round shoe molding. I d vote for doors first it will make installation of the door easier by not having to worry about floor clearances.

Floor covering or finish flooring is the surface that you see and walk on not the subfloor under the underlayment or underlayment between subfloor and finished layer. Walls are put up first then the floor covering comes later. Most builders leave the floors for last. Before the floors go in you can easily shim one end of the jamb to get the door exactly plumb.

On a professional job all the doors are hung first then cased. This is for timing. By having all the doors and trim up first the painters can come in and spray everything out and get the first coat of color on the walls. Apparently so i learned this today the hard way.

Typically cabinets come before flooring. Work on your floors first if your gutted room has baseboards that are still in place. Baseboard goes down then the 2nd coat of paint goes on. Finally install the cabinets on both strips and attach the toekicks.

Got laminate floors installed in july and then decided i wanted new interior doors. Once installed when you re doing the floor you then cut the jamb legs so that they just clear the flooring and any padding glue etc. When you run a floor sander around a room there is the possibility of scuffing up newly painted walls. Now install the new flooring but keep it about a inch from the first filler strip.

Screw a strip of the same thickness to the floor next to the wall. The flooring will be able to expand and contract beneath the toekick without revealing a gap. Trim after dry wall. Then the flooring installers come in and do their thing.

Theres one good reason to install the doors first and that is if your floor is not level across the threshold almost always off by some factor in my house.