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From what I know, prehung doors are a huge pain to install correctly. But, with door blanks, the hinges aren't routed out. Which of these methods is best when it comes to interior doors: using prehung doors or cutting out the hinge patterns on door blanks?

Are there any other ways to replace interior doors?

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up vote 5 down vote accepted

This would depend on the tools at hand. If you have the proper chisels and jigs using a blank would be fairly easy, and you would not have to worry about squaring and plumbing the frame.

If you only have a 4' level, a hammer, and some shims hanging a pre-hung door would probably be your best bet.

A third option is if you could find a pre-hung where the hinges would line up with the existing frame, you could simply hang the pre-hung door in the old frame. This option eliminates almost all the work.

In my opinion, if the existing frame is true I would rather use a blank. Most pre-hung doors come with really cheap crappy frames (unless you pay extra for a good one), so any time I've used one I ended up building my own frame anyway.

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Obviously, replacing with a prehung door, even a split jam prehung is a lot more work than mortising in hinges into a blank. The whole trick to proper door alignment is to scribe the hinge locations exactly by aligning the doors together and use a square to transfer the mortise locations. A jig and router is cool, but easily done with a sharp chisel and hammer. The technique is not difficult, but very hard to describe in words. Look up a video on TOH or Utube to help with the method. Too deep or shallow will cause door to not open/close properly. –  shirlock homes Jan 10 '11 at 18:07
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