Last night, Cayce got us up at 12, 2, 4, and 6 am to take her outside. It's like she had a freakin' watch on, it was so regular.

It wouldn't have been all that bad, but Kirsten and I were exhausted after spending the day replacing our front door.

The doors on our house are original to the house. As such, this means they're not the least bit energy efficient. Kirsten decided that it was time to start thinking about replacing them a couple of weeks ago when she discovered a layer of ice on our bak door.

Since this weekend was pretty warm, we decided it would be a good time to replace them. We were busy all Saturday, so we only had Sunday to pick up the doors and replace them.

Nine hours later, we had only replaced our front door (which still needs some work). A hint to those who may want to do this in the future: buy a prehung door: do not make and install your own door jamb. It's not worth it!

That being said -- we really had no choice in the matter. Our front door is 34" wide. For some reason, the Home Depot doesn't carry 34" doors - just 32" and 36". Fortunately, they did have one 34" door that was special ordered in and never picked up -- but there was no frame attached to it.

This meant that we had to build our own door jamb, and install it in the opening. Since our house is constantly striving to show us just how hard it can make our lives, it turned out that the original door was installed with super-thick jamb material - a good 3/4" thicker than the jamb you can buy today.

So, before I could install the door jamb, I had to build in the opening, so it would be just the right size for the door to be installed. I also - since the jamb doesn't come precut, had to notch out a place for the header to sit, and angle-cut and notch out a space for the new threshold. It took about 6 hours to just get the door jamb into the opening.

After I was satisfied that the door jamb was in and wasn't going anywhere, I had to actually hang the door.

Again, since the jamb isn't precut or anything, this meant chiseling out a space for the hinges to recess into. Since the jamb was already in place (I likely could have planned things better), we had to put the hinges on the door, hold the door up in the approximate place we wanted it to sit, then chisel the space for the hinges out by hand.

It took much adjusting, and wasn't an easy process.

Finally, at 9:30, the door was hung, holes were bored for the deadbolt and lock, and the weatherstripping was installed. Tonight, I have to make some minor adjustments, since the bottom hinge isn't recessed enough into the jamb, and air is getting through.

Next weekend, we will take the back door out and replace it (thankfully with a prehung door). Of course, that's also going to present problems of its own, as we have to take the alarm sensor into account.

So, in summary, take my advice: Don't install a door jamb yourself. Pay the extra money to get a prehung door. Or, better yet, pay someone else to do it.