Shut The Front Door!

Toward the end of February, I finally managed to kidnap my dad for five minutes and put a new front door in. The man is in high demand between work, maintaining the family home, and an entire clan of children - whether born or taken in - so any time he is available for me, we usually end up working on a project together. It's nice, since I'm learning a lot along the way, and even in my childhood this is the way we've always bonded. We are not the type to be comfortable just sitting at a table together for conversation. We're do-ers. Gotta keep busy!

I may have mentioned before how much I dislike our front door. It's got aesthetic potential, but as far as security and climate control, it was useless.
So, we ripped that mo-fo out!

Taking it to the next, we ripped out the old, decaying, basically one earthquake from crumbling, door frame.
Dad started out with his own saw, below, but when it "wasn't working enough," had to go get my epic reciprocating saw that we use to chop wood/trees. I know if I ever get "robbed" where to look, although at this point for as much as we borrow each others' stuff, I couldn't really tell what was originally mine anyway.

We cheated, sort of, and got a pre-hung steel door on clearance. As all of you nice people have learned, I never pay full price for anything, ever.

It installed surprisingly smoothly, with only a few issues with shimming. Considering how cheap the door was, I wasn't about to complain about adding a little extra weatherstripping if needed.

Of course living in the desert means there's quite a bit of freeloaders small enough to creep in any crack or crevice, which is why I immediately hit the door frame and the stucco with expanding foam, which is the orange/yellow you see above. We've had way too many issues with the creatures of the night making themselves comfortable in the house, so I was taking all precautions.

As it turns out, it seems the evil door may have been a root cause of our bug issues. We carpet- bombed the house again after this install, assuming that all the disturbance would rouse the less than savory members of the house. Sure enough after about a week and a small holocaust, we've had no further invasions - knock on wood, literally!