Door Jamb Surprise!

I own a 125-ish year old house that looked like only crackheads had worked on it before I bought it, so you know what kind of surprise I’m talking about. But before we get to that, a really long back story:

I’ve always felt lukewarm about my front door (and I was doing mental backflips to train myself into even feeling that good about it). More recently, I’ve come to feel the same way about the JAMB. You probably think I’m crazy to care about such an arcane detail, but here’s how it went. There are so few original door jambs around that aren’t obscured by modern storm doors that it took me ages to notice. But look below how the deep jamb goes around both the door and the transom, and then there’s a mullion with pretty awdentils on it between the doors and the transoms. (These doors probably date to the 1930’s but appear to be in original jambs on houses identical to mine.)

My front door’s jamb goes around the door only and the transom is picture framed with its own jamb stacked above it. I found a fragment of the original brick mold inside the wall, but I’m stuck with flat mahogany here. I wasn’t about to change any of this though because… how much money am I supposed to throw at everything?

I already hired the Irishman to build custom jamb extensions and reproduction 1930’s casings to make it look not-wonky on the inside. Trust me: a lot of creativity (and expense) went into this already.

So I walk by OLD front door jambs and sigh. It’s not meant to be.

On the other hand, this even older fanlight doesn’t have its mullion set back inside the jamb. Can we just pretend that my jamb is half as pretty?

But I’ve had new perspectives all over my facade since I’ve taken the awnings down and been able to put a ladder against it for the first time. Some of these fill my heart with joy, like the sight of bubbling paint. For a moment I can pretend that it’s going to come off willingly.

But this one gave me very much the opposite emotion:

Gasp, the picture framed transom jamb is holding water. It slopes the wrong way! Another thing that HAS to change before winter. Joy.

Anyways, if money were no object, we could talk about carefully removing the (extremely cheap but irreplaceable) custom made interior casings, trashing ALL OF THIS including the custom interior jamb extensions, having pretty reproduction brick mold custom made, finding a cool fancy detail for the mullion, and getting a new, period correct jamb custom built for the salvaged door I already bought. I could.

But instead I’m planning on working around this mess by removing the current glass, adding a stop molding onto the transom jamb, and installing new glass with putty glazing at the outer edge of the door frame. I’ll make the stops square since they don’t show anyway and it MIGHT make sense to later add a storm window up there. The front door will then sit about 6 inches back from the transom, which is not ideal, but it might actually look better than what I have now.

At a minimum, I want to install the glass and the glazing putty and paint the jambs to match the window jambs before Thanksgiving. Yes, I’m painting the mahogany. I’ll then have a weird deep window sill up high inside my transom, and maybe I can put silly things on display up there for laughs.