How to Install a Door to Our Bathroom Archway: Part II

How to Install a Door to a Bathroom Archway: Part 2

Updated May 2019

Continued from Part One of my post about installing a door to an arched bathroom entrance. In Part One, a friend from church used his nail gun to place a frame inside our archway (pictures of installing the framing in Part One.)

A list of all the supplies needed for this project are listed at the bottom of this page. 

Our drywall installer came over yesterday to drywall the arched doorway frame. We've been waiting for about a month for this particular installer because he comes highly recommended AND he only charged us $50! I could have nailed the drywall to the frame myself but if I had attempted the taping, applying putty and texturizing, it would NOT have looked nearly as nice. Plus, I figure, for $50 I get a one-on-one lesson from a professional on how to do this stuff :-)

Cutting Drywall to Cover the Frame

Cutting the top arch semi-circle crescent out of drywall. Tool: razor knife.

In this step, he cut out a semi-circle of drywall from a much larger piece. He skillfully used a razor knife to score the drywall and easily separate his circle pattern.

He repeatedly placed his newly cut piece of drywall up in the place where it would eventually be puttied in to check for the correct size. After a few cuts and snips, it fit nicely and he nailed it in place.

He used the wood braces for the drywall anchors and standard hammer and nails to hold it in place.

Cutting strips to use along sides of door frame

He went back to his large piece of drywall board and cut some long thin strips. After placing them alongside the door frame to check for accuracy, he cut trimmed them to the proper size. 

These were again nailed to the wood frame for support. He did this on both sides of the doors. Two archway semi-circles and four long strips to cover the sides. 

The nail heads were visible but would be covered with putty later. 

The new doorway is starting to take shape and looks terrific!

Nailing strips onto sides of door frame

The materials he used were:

• standard hammer
• standard nails
• Sheetrock brand All Purpose Joint Compound
• Sheetrock setting compound
• tape

All of these materials with links to Amazon to purchase will be listed at the bottom of this post. 

This turned out to be a very affordable project and one that could be completed in one weekend (although there is drying time needed between a few steps.)

The drop cloth  (seen in the Sheetrock product picture) on the ground was really helpful in keeping the floor clean during the whole process. When he was done, he used a little portable vacuum cleaner to pick up what little dust and debris were left after the door install was complete. 

 

Joint compound used to seal seams and cracks. Mix with water until mud-like texture.

He mixed the second type of mud in for the final coat (lessened the drying time?)

 

All the putty is smoothed with a trough (trow?) In the foreground, you can see two types of tape that he used. One looks like wide masking tape, the other a green "mesh" or net-looking tape. The first tape was creased long-ways (vertically) and placed down the 90-degree seams (where "old" wall met new drywall). Putty went on before and after this tape and smoothed. The mesh tape was used over joints or seams that were flat. I think it was to prevent cracking after the putty dried.

Masking tape in the 90-degree corner (yellow-ish color), mesh tape over the seam where two pieces of drywall came together. Putty easily covers all tape, nail heads, and any other cracks or holes. Blue paint on the far left is our bedroom wall (before the 90-degree curve to the archway).

This is the view from inside the bathroom. Archway fades into a square door top.

He used real masking tape to tape off an area around the doorway to prep for spraying the texture. That's our collection of Disneyland neck lanyards hanging inside the bathroom. They are not hanging from the top of the doorway, it just looks like they are. After laying a base layer of masking tape (as a boundary), he taped on a series of draping plastic sheets to keep the texture spray from over spraying onto other parts of our room. He kind of created his own little paint booth by taping and draping so that only his work area was exposed.

The final product from the inside of the bathroom. Texture complete. It's evening now and a little darker in the picture. It took him about 4 hours, working by himself to do this part of the project (and he was very quick in his motions, he was definitely a seasoned veteran.) I think he said it would take about 4-5 hours for the whole thing to dry. He said we could "lightly sand it" and then paint.

This is the finished view from outside our bathroom. The inner door (door gives privacy to the toilet) is opened in the background showing pictures inside the toilet room (we kinda had a bathroom inside a bathroom or more accurately, a toilet room inside a bathroom). Does that make sense?

I didn't take a picture of his texture sprayer and couldn't find one on google images. It reminded me of an old bug sprayer kinda like this one but NOT red. It was a long tube but had a much bigger diameter. I'm guessing he stuck the tube down inside his bucket of texture and used the handled piston to draw-up the texture. Then sprayed the texture out by pushing the piston inward. It gave a sort of splattered effect which matched the texture on our walls near perfectly.

Now, all we need is to have the door hanged (or is it hung?) I don't do drywall...or grammar well. LOL. We're one step closer to having a completely private bathroom (remember, we have six daughters!) As mentioned in my first post about this project, this room could also be used as a saferoom with a little help from Door Jamb Armor.

This is the end of my tutorial on how to install a door to an archway. I have never installed a door before so this was a great learning opportunity for me. The guy in this part of the install project was very nice to let me photograph everything he was doing. I was glad I took four semesters of Spanish in college or I wouldn't have been able to talk to him.

The secondary lesson here is to always try to learn from the person you are paying to do a project for you. You don't always want to pay someone else to install things for you. At some point, I will need to do these kinds of projects for my girls when they get their own houses. Perhaps I will be teaching their husbands how to install doors in archways.

Thanks for stopping by. Leave a comment below if this was helpful.

Here's a list of the tools used in this project:





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