We’ve recently made some small-to-large improvements in our house’s flooring by putting down FLOR carpet squares and then pulling up old carpet in another room. After we made these changes, we were left with weird carpet-to-hardwood and hardwood-to-linoleum doorway transitions. Or non-transitions. So until now, we had carpet squares that just kind of hung over the hardwood in our hallway and a bare spot that shows three (!) levels of linoleum on top of the hardwood flooring in our kitchen to dining room doorway. Instead of continuing to look at these poor transitions, I figured we could put down some simple thresholds to make the rooms seem a little more finished.
The thresholds are the ribbed metal sort that, to be honest, aren’t the best things to look at, but they’re at least a step in the right direction. Today, I got a gold metal threshold to transition between the carpet squares and the hardwood hallway and installed that bad boy.
Now, the metal thresholds come in two lengths: 36″ and something much longer (I didn’t look because I knew it wouldn’t fit). So I also had to pick up a metal hacksaw blade so I could cut the threshold to fit our doorway. Cutting almost always means measuring, so I had to do some measurements to make sure I cut the threshold to the right length. This particular doorway also has a little doorjamb piece that meant the threshold had to be one length over the carpet and a shorter length over the hardwood.
I needed the carpet side to be 30″ and the hardwood side to be just a little over 29″, so I took off a little less than 0.5″ in the middle–this is turning out not to be as clear as I want, but I think the pictures will make it easy to see what I mean.
you can see my marks for where to cut the bottom right corner off
After I measured the doorway and made some pencil marks on the underside of the threshold, I went at it with the hacksaw. A few minutes of awkward holding the threshold over a work bench to keep it steady enough to cut, I had the threshold sawed up so it’d fit in the doorway.
and here it is cut. turned out to be a little more than 0.5"
Then it was as easy as nailing it down to the floor. Ain’t nothing to it.
It might not look super fancy, but at least it’ll keep the edge of the carpet from getting pulled/messed up. There’s been talk of painting the thresholds so they aren’t so bright gold. We’ll see how bad it is to live with the gold first, I guess.
We’re thinking of using a hardwood threshold for the doorway between the kitchen and dining room. Maybe a weekend project.
