Simple Door Sweep
A piece of rubber-cove base makes a cheap and easy door sweep for an exterior door.
Cheap and Easy Door Sweep: Tip submitted by Patricia Steed
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.
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Two problems: if the floor on the path of the door’s swing is not level, it can bind as the slope rises. Second, the friction of the floor will quickly wear away the rubber, leaving a gap. An inexpensive sweep, which is pressed down against the floor via a stop on the jamb, allows the sweep to press on the floor only when the door is closed, avoiding the abrasion of the floor during the closing. If the floor is rough, or if it rises within the arc of the swing, this is important to avoid quickly wearing away the sweep. It may cost a bit more, but you won’t be replacing it every few months.