The bedroom door has been sticking in the frame for months because the wood warped during the humid weather, and it finally got so bad you had to basically kick it just to get it open. I thought buying a pre cut slab door from the store would be a simple swap since the size matched the old one perfectly. What a complete joke. It turns out no two door frames in an old house are actually square, and trying to hang a door by yourself is pure frustration.
The worst part was trying to line up the new hinge cutouts with the slots on the existing frame. I had to use a sharp wood chisel to manually carve out the recessed spots on the side of the new door, and if you go even a millimeter too deep, the whole door sits crookedly and won’t latch at all. My chisel slipped on the second cutout and gouged a giant scratch right across the fresh wood, so that was a great start to the day.
Then came the actual hanging process. Trying to balance a heavy wooden door on the tips of your boots while lining up the tiny metal hinge pins with one hand and holding a screw in your mouth is practically impossible. I kept dropping the screws into the carpet, and the door kept swinging loose and slamming against the wall molding. When I finally got the pins hammered in and tried to shut it, the top corner scraped heavily against the upper frame and stuck completely fast.
I spent the next hour taking the entire door back down, using a hand plane to shave down the top edge, and hanging it up all over again just to check the fit. It actually closes and latches smoothly now without sticking, but the new wood doesn’t match the old frame paint at all. Now I have to go hunt down a matching can of white semi gloss paint in the garage because the mismatch looks completely ridiculous every time the hallway light is on.