Make door for side of garage? | Construction and DIY projects | Forums

easiest way would be get a prehung door, it will have your rough opening required for the door, usually it's about a inch greater than the width of the door. What I would do is cut out the studs on the inside of the garage and frame everything out, you want a king stud that will run from the floor to wall plate, these will be full height. Then nail in jack studs, these will be the height of the rough opening for the door.

You then nail on a header spanning the jack studs to carry the weight of the load. Depending on what you have for framing will depend on the thickness of the header. If you have 2x4 wall nail 2 2x6 together with a piece of half inch plywood between them and this will give you your 3.5 inch thickness of the framing. A 2x4 is really a 1.5x3.5. If you have 2x6 framing your studs are actually 5.5 inch thick. So you would want to use 3 pieces of 2x6 and 2 half inch plywood to build it to 5.5 inch thick.

Once you have the header built, just nail it onto the jack studs and then put in some cripple studs between the top of the header and the top wall plate. Maintain the 16 or 24 inch on center, whatever your garage framing is, it will make it easier if you need to hang drywall or plywood, whatever.

It will look like this

Once that is framed out just take the sawzal and cut out the opening. If you have vinyl siding you want to remove it or else it will get all chipped to hell with using a sawzal.

To mount the door, I mount it on the hinge side first. If you are lucky the stud will be level, probably won't be though, so use cedar shims to level it out and then nail or screw through the frame and shims into the stud. I usually then go around and level the the bottom and sides and keep shimming as needed as I go.

That would be the easiest way, now if you actually want to build the door, the easiest way would be use 2x6 t&g spruce and cap them with a 2x6 on the top and bottom, you can see that in our barn thread. You would want to use a drill guide like this to angle into the wood so you can countersink the screws into the boards and you would be screwing each board together to hold them in place

here we were assembling the doors, you can see where we also screwed the top and bottom plate into the t&g