Day 2 of getting the new slider installed picked-up with finishing the framing for the new opening. But first let’s have breakfast where our future deck will be!
First up was removing all the siding from around the opening and yes it was done on the sketchy ladder!
Then we added a beam along the top because the slider wasn’t as tall as the old window.
Next up the ever important waterproofing step! We used a slightly different rubberized sealing material from the garage window waterproofing on the base of the sill. No water getting in here!!
Now we were ready to get the door frame installed!! This really wasn’t a 2 person job because it was such a large frame but we did it! I was holding it in place (sometimes tilting it outwards which was difficult at times) while Mace was applying the caulk around the frame (no pics, my hands were full!). A second person to help set and level the frame would have been nice because the caulk started to set-up while Mace was working on a side at a time but we were able to make it work.
We put weights on the door sill to help it adhere.
And here’s the installed slider door frame!! Quite the view out the back too!
Next up was the exciting part, getting the door panels in and fit to the space! And its not as straight forward as putting them up and done, just like with the master closet doors there are lots of little tweaks that are done to make the operate smoothly. It was so exciting to see doors go in because the vision was coming together (and we wouldn’t have a hole in the house anymore!) and we were getting closer to the finish line! Ain’t they pretty!
Well I wish this story continued on its upward momentum but our excitement was short lived. We quickly saw that when we closed the center panels they didn’t meet and there was about an inch gap in between them. Our hearts were sinking…
We could muscle the doors together but obviously that wasn’t supposed to be how they operated. Mace began to think something was wrong with the frame so we took the doors out and made sure the frame was square (which it was) and the panels still didn’t meet. We identified the issue was the weatherproofing where the sliders met the stationary doors and somehow it wasn’t sitting correctly, thought it could be a manufacturer defect, and mulled over this issue for almost a week. We were kind of on pins and needles because it would be a BIG deal if we didn’t get this thing figured out and we weren’t keen on paying someone from Anderson to come out. In the end we found some websites that addressed this issue and its common with Anderson doors and after about 8 weeks the weatherproofing should be correctly formed to the door after they’ve been latched together (which kinda makes sense because most new sliders in stores would have been assembled and sitting in their finished form for months, we had to assemble ours). WHEW, it wasn’t us!! Its been about 5 months since we installed them and I can say that they meet in the middle with no issues, yay!!
So our slider install sat like this for about a week with loads of work still to do (both of us stressing over the schedule delay because guess what, I was hosting a party soon!) but you can start to see what it was going to look like both inside and out!!
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