Doors That Actually Latch — Interior Doors & Trim Carpentry in Eugene, OR
A door is about twenty per cent the slab and eighty per cent the opening it hangs in. In a house built before the war, that is the whole job — and it is why the cheapest quote is usually the one that has not measured yet.
Interior finish carpentry, and only that
No exterior doors, no staircases, no general remodeling. If it is an interior door or a piece of trim, it is ours.
A finish carpentry shop on West 6th
Alderline has done interior finish work in Eugene since 2011. We are not a remodeling company with a trim guy — trim and doors are the whole business, which is why we can afford to care about a sixteenth of an inch on a reveal.
We are also deliberately narrow at the edges. We do not hang exterior or entry doors, we do not build staircases or handrails, and we do not do the drywall or the paint. Each of those is a trade with its own habits, and being adjacent to a job is not the same as being good at it.
- ✓Interior doors and trim only — no exteriors, no stairs
- ✓Era-matched profiles milled from flat stock
- ✓Joints glued and pinned, not held together by caulk
- ✓OR CCB #221704
Five things that decide what a trim job costs
Paint-grade or stain-grade
MDF is cheap, stable and takes paint beautifully — and can never be stained. Poplar is the paint-grade step up. Alder and fir are what you want if the grain is going to show. This one choice moves the material cost more than the profile does.
Ask usWhether the opening is square
A prehung door assumes a square, plumb opening. Older Eugene houses have settled, so the jamb has to be scribed or rebuilt. It is the difference between a two-hour install and most of a day.
Ask usHow many inside corners
Long straight runs are quick. Rooms with bays, returns and short walls are slow, because every inside corner is a coped joint cut by hand rather than a mitre off the saw.
Ask usSolid-core or hollow-core
Solid blanks cost more per door and need heavier hinges, and they are the only version anybody notices after the first week. We quote both so the trade-off is yours rather than assumed.
Ask usWho is painting it
Trim finished in the shop before it goes up looks better and takes less of your house out of service. If your painter is doing it on site, we detail the joints differently. Say which at the quote.
Ask us
Twenty per cent is the door. Eighty per cent is the hole
A prehung door is built on the assumption that the opening is plumb, level and square. In a house that has been standing on Willamette Valley soil since 1923, it is none of those things — the header has sagged a little, the studs have twisted, and the opening is a parallelogram by a quarter of an inch.
Drop a factory unit into that and it will look fine for a week. Then the reveal tapers, the latch stops meeting the strike squarely, and the door starts swinging open or shut on its own because the hinge side is out of plumb. None of that is the door's fault.
So we measure the opening in both diagonals before we quote a slab. Sometimes the answer is a prehung unit and an hour of shimming. Sometimes it is scribing the jamb, and sometimes the honest answer is that your existing doors are perfectly good and it is the frames that need the work.
- ✓Both diagonals measured before any door is ordered
- ✓Existing doors rehung where the slabs are sound
- ✓We will tell you when the frame is the problem
Three habits that show up in year two
1Coped, not mitred, on inside corners
A mitred inside corner opens as the house moves through a wet winter and a dry summer. A coped joint slides against itself instead, so the line stays closed. It takes longer and it is the single clearest tell of who did the work.
2Glue and pins, then caulk
Caulk is a finish, not a fastener. A joint that is only caulked will show a hairline crack within a year or two. We glue and pin the joint first so the caulk is only doing the job it is good at.
3Profiles matched to the era
A 1912 bungalow with 1990s colonial casing reads wrong to everyone, even people who could not tell you why. Craftsman casing is flat stock with butt joints and a capped head; we mill it rather than approximate it from the rack.
Solid-core doors are the cheapest thing you can do to how a house sounds
Almost every interior door in an American house built after about 1960 is hollow — two thin skins over a cardboard honeycomb. They are light, cheap and they stop essentially no sound. If you work from a bedroom off the living room, that door is why you can hear the television.
A solid-core blank is three to four times the weight and drops the noise through the doorway to something you would describe as muffled rather than audible. Per dollar it beats acoustic panels, rugs and white noise machines comfortably, and it is invisible once painted.
It is not free: the doors cost more, they need heavier hinges, and in an old house the frame may need reinforcing to carry them. But almost nobody is offered the choice, which is why we quote it as a line item rather than waiting to be asked.
- ✓Quoted as a line item on every door job
- ✓Heavier hinges and frame reinforcement included
- ✓Most noticeable on offices and bedrooms off living space
Measure, mill, hang
Measure and match
Every opening measured in both diagonals, and a profile taken off whatever original trim the house still has so new work matches rather than approximates.
Written quote with the choices in it
Paint-grade or stain-grade, hollow or solid core, shop-finished or site-finished — priced separately so you can see what each one is actually costing you.
Milled and prefinished
Stock is milled and, where you want it, primed or finished in the shop. Less dust in your house and a better finish than a brush can manage on site.
Hung, coped and walked
Fitted, joints glued and pinned, then we open and close every door with you and check the reveals before the tools go back in the van.
Doors sticking every winter?
That is usually the frame, not the door — and it is a much cheaper conversation than the one you are expecting. We will measure the openings and tell you which it is.
Doors and trim, answered
My doors stick in winter. Do I need new ones?
Usually not. Wood doors take on a little moisture in a wet Willamette Valley winter, but a door that sticks every year in the same place is normally telling you the frame has moved rather than the slab has swollen. We measure the opening's diagonals; if the frame has racked, rehanging what you already own is the cheaper and better answer.
What is the difference between hollow-core and solid-core?
A hollow-core door is two thin skins over a cardboard honeycomb — light, inexpensive and close to acoustically transparent. A solid-core door has an engineered wood core, weighs three to four times as much, and is the single most effective thing you can do about noise between two rooms. It costs more per door and needs heavier hinges. We quote both on every job so the choice is yours.
Can you match a door to the ones we already have?
Usually yes. Most common panel configurations are still made, and where they are not we can build a slab to match. The harder part is normally the hardware — old mortise locks and 1920s hinge sizes do not always have modern equivalents, so we check that before promising a match.
How do I know what trim is right for my house?
Look at what the least-touched rooms still have — usually a bedroom or the upstairs hall. That is generally the original profile, and it is what we take a template from. Broadly, craftsman houses want flat stock with a capped head casing and butt joints, Victorians want ogee profiles and plinth blocks, and mid-century ranches want simple ranch casing. Getting this right matters more to how a room reads than the paint colour does.
Is MDF trim a compromise?
Not if it is going to be painted. MDF is dimensionally stable, has no knots or grain to telegraph through paint, and takes a finish better than most softwoods. What it cannot do is take a stain, and it does not like standing water — so we do not use it in bathrooms below the splash line or anywhere it could get wet.
Why did my last trim job crack at the corners?
Almost always because the joints were mitred and caulked rather than coped, glued and pinned. A mitre relies on two surfaces staying at exactly forty-five degrees to each other, and houses move seasonally. A coped joint slides against itself instead, so the line stays closed. Caulk on top of a properly fastened joint is a finish; caulk instead of one is a countdown.
How much does interior trim cost in Eugene?
Casing and base for a typical room commonly runs in the high hundreds to low thousands depending on the material and the number of inside corners, and a whole-house trim replacement is a multi-thousand project. Doors vary more: a paint-grade hollow-core slab hung in a true opening is inexpensive, while a solid-core door in a racked 1920s frame can cost several times that in labour. We quote from a measure, never a phone call.
How long will you be in my house?
A few doors is one to two days. A room of casing and base is usually a day. Whole-house trim runs one to two weeks, but a large part of that is shop time rather than time in your house — we mill and prefinish off site precisely so your rooms are not out of service for the whole job.
Do you paint the trim as well?
We prime and finish in the shop when you want it, which gives a better result than brushwork on site. We do not do the walls, and we do not do touch-up painting after other trades. If you have a painter, tell us at the quote and we will detail the joints for their process.
Tell us about the doors
How many, roughly when the house was built, and whether anything is sticking. A photo of an existing casing helps — it tells us the era and the profile before we arrive.