When my husband built a set of exterior doors, he wanted a simple sweep for the bottom. There are a lot of commercial sweeps available, but he came up with one that’s dirt simple, cheap, and easy to replace when it wears out. After hanging the door and measuring the gap between its bottom and the threshold, he removed the door and laid it on sawhorses. Then he clamped a saw guide to the bottom and cut a 3/4-in.-deep kerf along the center of the door.
He made the sweep out of a piece of rubber-cove base from a home center—the cheap stuff you see glued to the walls in institutional buildings—by ripping it to width on a tablesaw. To determine the width of the sweep, he added the door-to-threshold distance to the 3/4-in. kerf dimension, plus 1⁄16 in. to provide a little pressure between the door and the floor. He slid the sweep into the kerf and secured it with 1-in. brass screws driven through the door every 6 in. Nails also would have worked, but using screws will make it easy to replace the sweep when it wears out.
Patricia Steed, Roxbury, CT
Edited and Illustrated by Charles Miller
From Fine Homebuilding #249
