New Doors & Windows

California Bob has been refurbishing his Sunset neighborhood row house for two years now. The project continues:

I'm replacing patio doors on the back of the house.  I originally had 4 patio doors -- 2 up, 2 down, the same layout, right above each other. For the 2 downstairs doors, I planned on having the contractor come over and get them both done in 1 day.  I wanted everything to go smoothly, so I did a lot of exploration and preparation beforehand.  The old aluminum doors were slightly narrower than the standard 72".  But cutting away some drywall, I see the jack studs are tight against the door frame.  Do I have narrow rough openings?  Am I going to have to order really expensive custom 71" doors?  Cutting away further, I see that there is an extra jack stud/trimmer on one side of the doors.  Cool: when I remove the extra jackstud, I'll have a rough opening like 72.5".  That's fine, so I buy the 72" doors.  And the installation goes pretty smoothly. Upstairs, I want to replace the 1 patio door in the living room with a window.  I figure I can do this myself and save a few bucks.  The measurements are all exactly the same as downstairs, so I'm assuming again that there's an extra jack stud on the side of the narrow door.   Starting demolition on Friday morning, I soon find that there's no extra jackstud.  Drat. The upstairs door opening is framed narrower than downstairs.  And I've already bought the window.  It seems like somewhere between the first and second floor, they wised up and framed the second floor narrower to fit the narrow door.  So when I finish demolition the rough opening is like 1/8" narrower than my window.  Double drat.  Window won't fit in the opening, let alone allowing for housewrap and sill flashing..... So I get the table saw out and "skinny down" a stud, sawing a fat 1/8" off the wide side, running it halfway through the stud one direction, then flipping it over for the second pass.  It was green doug fir, the table saw protested, but we got there. Interesting, after 30 years, there was a very loose fit between the jack stud and the header.  The way they call for fat headers, you think they support a lot of weight; this one was just kind of hanging there.  The new jack stud fit, the window fit in the opening, and fortunately the opening flared out toward the top so I could rack the window and get it vertical.  But that cost me some extra time, I didn't finish till dark, and I was pretty exhausted. One more patio door to replace.  I have to assume this is framed the same way (narrow).  I'll do some exploration to confirm.  If so, I'm going to get a couple KILN DRIED studs and skinny them down beforehand.  Hopefully I can get that last door done in a day as well.