 
Walk into any store selling reclaimed material and you will see doors door doors. Arranged like children's books, hardbacked but thin, slumped in a way that makes one nervous. Occasionally a white piece of tape will inform you of measurements -- don't trust it. Rarely is an old door square top to bottom.
How could humans spend so much time keeping other humans out? All this craft to separate us from each other?
Get over it. We've been taking our privacy for years, and I don't think it's going to stop anytime soon (as I blog away...). Fact remains we need these moveable walls, with their rails, stiles, raised panels and jambs, put together in a way that allows us to say hello or goodbye.
That lost foyer door you came across last weekend that can't help but remind you of Cider House Rules will work great for a pocket door -- these things seem to be all the rage. Put it on some old trolley track or barn door hardware, clear your walls of pipe and wire, and you have a classy clean divider. All well and good.
But for those interested in salvaging doors and re-using them for the same purpose, let me make a suggestion. Whether you're taking your door from a rowhome in Philly or the Mohawk House in the Catskills -- keep the doorjamb. It makes life so much easier. You don't find the folks at Home Depot selling too many doors that aren't pre-hung -- if they're good at one over there and one thing only it's figuring out what's easiest to install.
The importance of keeping the jamb makes even more sense when it comes to salvaged doors. (See an episode we taped on this same subject for Discovery Channel's "Renovation Nation" on their Green channel at http://www.greensawdesign.com/news.html.) The old-timers were just better carpenters than us, despite our best efforts with fancy tools. Clean even dadoes, inbuilt door stops, uniform-width jambs constructed from red or white oak to withstand centuries of slamming doors -- they put us to shame, and we can do nothing but learn at their feet. Or when that doesn't work -- just keep what they already @!%* built!
Listen buddy maybe you want to mess with the jamb but me I'll stick with the door and build the jamb later.
I'll grant you popping a few pins and unscrewing hinges is about as non-threatening as it gets. But trust me this takes more time then slipping in a reciprocating saw and slicing (pic to the left) through the shims and screws fastening the jamb to the rough opening and walking off with the whole kitten caboodle. Code your jambs to your door with blue tape, throw it in the truck bed and you're good to go.
Maybe your fancy Philadelphia Carpenter Hall craftsmen wanted to show off with their dadoed thresholds but my jamb, nice as it is, has no saddle. How is it gonna stay together?
Just screw in some one-by material to the endgrain of the jamb sides. And if you don't have a truck code the jamb carefully with A1, A2, and A3, take it completely apart, and put it back together again when you're ready for install (below, from a house on 21st & Pine, where we put in over thirty doors from St. Joseph's Seminary). The dadoes will make this task all the easier.
Same story for trim. If you have a bit of ambition and aren't too far from your install site and your trim is cross-nailed at the miters (as it should be) keep it all together, as shown in this photo to the right. If you've carefully pre-measured and built your rough openings with appropriate space left for your jamb thickness plus half an inch on either side for shims and play, you'll have your door in with trim in less than an hour.
Metal doors work the same way. Below are photos from a house in Pennsport where we used a salvaged metal door with lites from a house on Philadelphia's Main Line. After removing the old door, installing a lintel into the brick to extend the opening, we slipped in our new piece, carefully installed corner bead for the drywall, spackled and were golden.
So hallelujah for the movement to use salvaged doors. And many thanks to anyone interested and ambitious enough to even think of re-using a door. Hopefully this small piece of advice will help the descendants of all those lonely orphan doors in salvage shops find a happy home, and not sit stacked in a corner for so long -- unswung, unjambed, and generally unhinged.
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