Rant: spent 4 hours fighting a stupid jamb gap on a prehung door

Was installing a prehung door in a 1950s house in Portland last week. The jamb was like 1/4 inch too tight on the top corner for no reason. Took me forever to realize the previous owner had drywall mud built up behind the casing throwing everything off. Anyone else run into weird stuff hiding behind old trim that eats up your whole day?

2 comments

2 Comments

oliver71915h ago

Oh man, three layers of linoleum in a 1920s kitchen here in Seattle. I pulled up the top layer thinking it'd be a quick job, then found this nasty black adhesive underneath that took a heat gun and a scraper to get off. Under that was yet another layer of this old checkerboard stuff glued down with what I'm pretty sure was just straight up tar. The floor ended up being 1/2 inch higher than the subfloor originally was because of all that buildup. I spent an entire weekend just dealing with that mess when the actual tile install only took me like four hours.

cameron42614h ago

Man that tar stuff is the worst... I've seen that exact situation where people just keep piling new flooring on top of old instead of pulling it up, makes everything a nightmare when you finally gotta deal with it.