Is it a big job to replace door frames?

A door frame that has been fitted once and fitted right is not something East Lothian homeowners think about again, and that is exactly the point. George Herkes & Son Joinery has spent over 35 years making sure that is true, treating every door fitting job in East Lothian as work that has to hold up long after the joiner has left.

George Herkes & Son Joinery holds East Lothian Trading Standards Trusted Trader accreditation, a council-backed scheme that vets traders against rogue trading, and is rated 5.0 from 62 reviews under that same scheme. That standard applies across everything from a single hinge repair to our door fitting in Pencaitland, with the same team accountable on every job since 1989.

Get in touch with George Herkes & Son Joinery for a free quote on door fitting anywhere in East Lothian.

Is it a big job to replace door frames?

Replacing a door frame is bigger than fitting a door but rarely a big job for the house. Expect a day per opening in most cases: the old frame comes out, the wall gets checked and made good, a new frame goes in square, and the door is hung. Older or settled openings take longer.

What it does to the room

The frame is not a border round the door. It carries the weight of the door, ties into the wall opening, and often hides the join between plaster and structure. Pull it out and you expose whatever is behind it, which is the part people do not picture when they ask about a frame.

There is dust and there is mess. Plaster edges chip when an old frame is levered out, and skirting that meets the architrave usually needs cutting back or refitting. If you are having several doors done in the same visit, we sequence the rooms so you are not without a working door and a working room at the same time. That planning matters more in a family home than in an empty one. We do the same for a single opening in a flat as we do for a run of internal doors, whether that is one bedroom door or the whole upstairs, and the same logic applies whether the job is a repair or a full swap, or something more specialist like door fitting in Penicuik carried out to match an existing style.

Done properly, the room looks untouched once it is finished. That is the standard to expect.

Bigger than hanging a door, smaller than you fear

Hanging a door on an existing frame is a few hours’ work. Replacing the frame itself adds removal, wall inspection, packing and re-lining, and finishing round the new joinery. It is a bigger job. It is not a building project.

Most frame replacements stay contained to the one opening. The wall does not move, the floor does not change, and the ceiling is untouched. What changes is the timber surround and, where needed, a section of the wall immediately around it. Where the existing frame has been fitted well and the opening is square, a straight swap can be quick. Where it has not, or where the house has settled over the years, there is more to correct before the new frame goes in.

We get asked this by people who have already had one bad experience with a frame that was never square to begin with, and by people who simply want a straight answer before they commit. Both get the same answer. It is worth checking who does door fitting in Portobello or anywhere else against how they describe this stage, because a rushed frame swap is the one that comes loose again within a year.

What is behind the frame

Behind an internal frame you usually find studwork, packing timber, and the plaster or plasterboard reveal that meets it. Behind an external frame you find the wall structure itself, whatever that is in your case, and often the source of the draught or damp that brought you to this question in the first place.

In East Lothian’s older stone properties, particularly in Haddington, North Berwick and Dunbar’s old town fabric, frames were often set directly into a stone reveal with no cavity behind them. That reveal can be uneven, and it does not forgive a frame that is forced into place rather than packed and levelled properly. Newer housing around Musselburgh, Prestonpans and Tranent tends to have a stud or blockwork opening that is more forgiving, but coastal exposure still takes its toll on external frames near the water at North Berwick and Dunbar, where salt air and wind-driven rain get into timber that has not been maintained.

What is behind the frame is the single biggest thing that decides how long the job takes, more than the frame itself. Some of the door fitting companies in Prestongrange we come across quote for the door and treat the wall behind it as an afterthought. We do not.

Where it gets complicated and What has to come off first

Complications come from three places: the wall structure behind the frame, whatever is fixed to the frame already, and what is happening in the room around it. Each one changes the job before a new frame is even measured.

• Skirting and architrave that meet the frame, which usually need to come off and often need replacing rather than reusing
• Locks, hinges, letterboxes and door furniture fixed through the old frame into the wall
• Plaster or render finished tight to the frame edge, which cracks when the frame is removed
• Damp or rot in the wall behind the frame, found only once the old timber is out
• An opening that is out of square, common in older stone buildings and in houses that have settled
• Multiple doors done together, where sequencing matters more than any single opening

None of that turns a frame replacement into structural work. It does mean the job is priced and planned around what is actually there, not around a guess made from the doorway. We see the same six factors drive the scope on jobs across the county, and asked directly about door fitting companies in Prestonpans, we would point to the same list. The frame is the visible part. What decides the size of the job is everything you cannot see until it is out.