I Can't Believe I Waited So Long!!!....Best Way to Install Pocket Doors

Well guys, I've got 11 pocket doors to set in this house and I'm trying a technique that I haven't personally done before but I'm seeing a lot of guys on Instagram use and it's called wet setting, your split jams for pocket doors. I think it's a game changer. So far, I'm really liking it. So I'm going to show you how to do it in this video. Okay, so we've got three pocket doors in this area and I've got the doors in the opening. As you can see on the backside here, I've got my block nailed on which gives me the offset that I need on the front edge of the door. There's a rubber bumper that the framers screwed to the back of the wall back there. So at this point, I have leveled or plumbed the door and I need to start shimming the strike side. In my location, most of the time we're using 2x6 walls for our pocket door cavities. So in this case, I've got 6 and 9 sixteenths flat jam which we will nail in place for the strike side. So what is the best way to shim the strike side of the door into place? What I have found is it works best to use cedar shims and shim to the door edge, nail those on, and then nail your flat jam on. So shimming is a really simple process. The first thing you want to do is close your door all the way and you want to take a look at the door and see where it's making contact with the framing. And wherever it's making contact, top or bottom, that's where I choose to start shimming. So on this door, I've got a gap at the top and I'm making contact down at the bottom. So I'll set my shims to about a quarter inch, nail those on on the bottom, then go up, shim to the top, middle, and then in between for a total of five shim points. An important note here, when you're nailing on these shims, if you shoot your nailer straight in, the nail is going to blow right through your shim. So in order to get your nail to be flush like this, you want to rock your nailer back a little bit and that's going to make so the drive pin makes contact further back. So a nail like that more flush is ideal and that's going to hold the shim on better. So the way I like to do this is pretty simple. I take my flat jam then, lift it up off the floor a little bit, line it up so it's even up here, then I'll come down to the bottom, even it up, make sure I'm looking good on both sides here. I nail into the jam on the outside on both sides. Now this part of the process is really key to getting this perfect. Now I'm going to cut off all of these shims and I want to save the thin portion of the shim and then I'm going to micro shim this to the door edge to make sure that it's perfect. What can happen a lot of times is if the framing isn't perfect, this strike side can have a little bit of a twist in it or something. So even though it's going to be really, really close, I want to go ahead and check it again. So I'm looking if I see any light gaps in between and then I'll go ahead and pick up these thin shim cutoffs off of the floor and then I can reuse these to micro shim the jams. So what I do is I just take the claw of my hammer, I put it in there and then I give it a little twist and I'll insert these thin jims, these thin shims to get everything nice and perfect. The other thing you want to do is you want to make sure that you check both edges of the door whenever you close it. So I'm going to check this side and then I'm also going to come around and look at this side and what that's going to do is it's going to tell you if that jam is twisted a little bit. I know that the edge of my door is square because I cut it with my track saw at zero degrees. So if I make the jam sit perfectly with the edge of that door, I know that the jam then is running perpendicular with the wall. So here we go, the door is micro shimmed now. You can see these little pieces of shim that I had just cut off. You can then use those to micro shim it. So check both sides of the door. Now we're good to move on to the next one. At this point in this little area here, we've got all of our strike side jams installed and micro shimmed so that we've got a very tight fit between the door and the jam. So this is the part where it gets a little tricky. Now I've got to rip my split jam pieces. I've seen production trim guys that just always rip their split jam pieces the exact same at two and five sixteenths or two and three eighths, whatever it may be. The issue with that is a lot of times the framers install these tracks at framing stage and a lot of times these tracks actually aren't centered in the wall. They can be off a little bit. So what I like to do is I'll close my door and I'll measure on both sides at the top here and here and then I'll go around and do the same thing on the other side of the door. If I find that the door is centered, great. I'll make both of the split jams the same width. If they're not and the track is off position and off center, then I need to adjust for that and rip my split jams at different widths or take the door off and try and center it. Actually, you could have done that before, but this is just the way I prefer to do it. I'll just rip them at different widths. On this house out of the 11 or so pocket doors, I've already done I think six or so and I haven't had to rip any at different widths yet, but in this particular little area with these three pocket doors, all of these are different. So I've got it written up here on top at the head jam two and a half inches and then if we come around here to the other side, I wrote two and a quarter inches. That'll help me keep track of which width goes where. Now we get to the exciting part of this install. So the age-old question, is there a better way to do pocket doors? A lot of us have struggled. I don't think I've ever heard a carpenter say that they like installing pocket doors and trimming them out because there's just not a real precise way to do it repeatedly over and over again. What often happens whenever you go to install your split jams is the stud is not perfect and so it'll twist in or out rather than keeping that nice straight line across the front edge of your split jams and the door edge, it'll want to twist in or out. So what can we do to come up with a better solution? A lot of guys, I shouldn't say a lot, I've seen a few guys on Instagram using this technique and that is wet setting your split jams. So to do that, we're going to take some blocks. I've got inch and a half GRK screws screwed into this and we will screw the block onto the door edge and then into the split jams and what that's going to do is it's going to leave a gap between the split jam and the framing and we're going to fill that with an adhesive that doesn't shrink or expand. So I'll start by screwing into the door. Now I want to use, I've got a Emtek mortise hardware on this, so I want to make sure that I've got a quarter inch gap between the door and the split jam to ensure I have enough space for my door hardware. So I'm going to take my quarter inch shim up here. Now you want to make sure on your split jam pieces that they are not touching the floor or your framing above. If they are touching it might not allow your door to open and close for whenever you put the adhesive on here. So give yourself give yourself a little bit of space when doing that. And this doesn't have to be really precise. The only thing that has to be really precise is your margin and it's really easy just to use a spacer block to get that margin absolutely perfect. So what I'm doing is using four blocks total on a 6x8 door. So I'm going to try and space these somewhat evenly here. So now what we've achieved is we've got our split jams installed and they are perfectly in line with that front edge of the door because we use these blocks. Now because I had my door set a little bit proud of my framing I've got a gap back here between the inside of the split jam and my framing. We can then fill that with adhesive let that set up and we avoid having to use these cedar shims to try and shim these split jams. So it's just a matter of screwing these blocks on applying adhesive to the back side setting it in place and then tacking it with a couple nails and then letting it set up. One note that I want to emphasize after I put this adhesive on and we set the door in place I'm going to tack a couple nails and I want to make sure that I do that in the area where the bump stop is back here in the wall which is about right here. If I nail it right here that's going to ensure that the door is pushed up against that bump stop and the door and the split jams are in the the position where they should be. All right so exciting stuff I've got these three doors I've got the split jams installed on all the doors then you see this adhesive here this is PL 375 do not use PL premium you do not want an adhesive that will expand. You'll be screwed because it'll as it cures it'll push the split jams in the door out which will make so that the door is then not resting against your bumper on the back so then you'll have to take the door off and add a shim to the back so that it everything comes out flush later on we don't want that. So anyways I've got adhesive on all these so to set is pretty simple again adhesive here all I'm going to do flip around here so that I can see what you're seeing got that adhesive this one's pretty tight to the stud so I didn't do a lot of adhesive but we just want to take it and push it right into place until you feel that door push up against the bumper on the back wall and then I'm going to add a couple of 18 gauge nails to keep everything in place and then that's it we'll set this one here and you can see that adhesive filling that cavity in here now all I want to do is take my 18 gauge nailer and I want to feel and ensure that the door is sitting up against the bumper and then I want to look to make sure that this is centered with the drywall and get it where I want it to be I'm just going to take the nailer very gently just tack a couple nails and all that's going to do is ensure that it stays in place as this adhesive cures and sets go over here do the same thing make sure that it's sitting in place up against that bumper looks like the drywall is a little bit more funky on this one so again just try and get everything centered where you want it the best you can and again just a couple nails you don't want to use 15 gauge nails to do this because that could potentially pull it in and then once you pull your blocks off the door might be jacked up and that might not be in line that's it next thing I'm going to do is just measure for my top pieces of the split jam between here and here and I like to go a hair under that way I know that I'm you don't want to force that into place the way that we're doing this so I got these six pieces I'm going to measure the nice thing is on the split jams if you set your strike jam correctly and then you know that your split jams are set in plane these two pieces on both sides should always be the same length so that makes things a little easier too just a little more precise so I'm going to go ahead and cut these install those and then move on to the next area where I've got three more pocket doors to do that I'm done well guys at this point I've got eight of the eleven pocket doors trimmed out and I wanted to save these last few to show you guys the end result but I am absolutely thrilled with how these others that I've done so far have turned out the split jams are absolutely perfect I've never had them this good so this wet setting method is definitely a keeper there are a few things you have to watch out for the biggest thing is you do not want to use an adhesive that is going to shrink or expand such as a PL premium which would expand a lot that's going to jack everything up so you need to use an adhesive that is not going to change a lot I used some liquid nails that worked well and some PL 375 that also seemed to work really well on these the other key I left everything screwed I finished these up on a Friday it's now Monday so I left everything screwed in place so it definitely had plenty of time to set up I don't think you need to get in any hurry to take these blocks off you can actually trim these doors out with the blocks still on so if you're concerned that maybe your adhesive isn't quite set up yet you can still completely trim these out just leave your blocks screwed on and take them off a couple days later or whatever that's no big deal but I do want to continue to look into different adhesives find something that's going to set up faster without either expansion or shrinkage so if you know of anything do drop a comment below and let me know if there's any particular products I should be looking at as far as order of operation operations goes on trimming these out just simply nail your casing on inside edge and outside edge that's also going to help stabilize your split jams even though they're wet set I don't think they're going to move but it certainly doesn't hurt and as you know sometimes casing legs are not straight so if you need to bend them back and forth a little bit I think it makes sense to leave your blocks screwed on until you've got your casing completely nailed off and that's been working really well for me so far and then after the casing is nailed off we'll go ahead and unscrew our blocks double check make sure the door looks good which it absolutely should and then attach the pocket door guides on the bottom which will keep the door centered in the cavity now here's what we want to see as we open and close the pocket door we want to see that that front edge of the door is perfectly in plane with our split jams and as you can see here as I close that door all the way and it hits that bumper I'm perfect so this is awesome so just want to take a quick second to show you the margins and how these doors look going across it I'm going to flip the camera around obviously there's 11 doors on this house so I'm not going to show you all 11 doors and bore you with that but I wanted to just show you again we've got mortise hardware on this so I want a quarter inch margin here to ensure that we don't have issues with the hardware but just extremely pleased with how these came together and if you put square across these it looks really good I know that's not focusing very well but I'm really happy with these everything's looking good I think anytime you can take just the variables of crooked framing twisted framing out of the equation with a method like this wet setting these split jams that's a win I mean this this is as close to perfection I think as you're going to get with pocket doors