Gary Wentz: Hi! I'm Gary Wentz, an Editor with the Family Handyman Magazine, the leader in DIY Home Improvement. Today we're talking about Door Fixes, and what I'm going to show you now, is how to cut off a door bottom, the goof-proof way. There are several reasons to cut off a door, maybe it's dragging on existing flooring or carpet. But in this case, this room is going to get a new floor; this plywood sub-floor is getting to get covered with a layer of under alignment followed by a layer of solid wood. And to represent the gap that I want under the door later, I just have a scrap of half-inch plywood. So I'm going to take my stack and samples here, mark the door, move it over to this side, do the same thing. Now the door is ready to take off and go out to the garage for some cutting.

So here we're, we've moved the door out into the garage, so we can cut it off. Now the usual way to cut off a door is just to grab the Circular Saw and cut, but there are two big problems with that. The first is that it's really hard to get a perfectly straight cut. The second is even worse, that is that, you'll inevitably get chipping on the face of the door where the Saw Teeth exit the wood, it happens at every time. To guarantee a perfect cut on your door, I'm going to show you how to build a homemade saw guide, that will give you absolutely flawless cuts every time. All it takes is a couple scraps of plywood; here I am going to screw this half-inch strip to the three quarter inch slab. That's just about all it takes, the guide is almost done. Now I just need to take the saw and make a cut along here. All we have to do at this point is align the guide with the cut marks we made earlier, clamp it down and we're ready to cut, we are guaranteed a perfect cut, you really cannot mess this up. There it is; an absolutely straight cut with no chipping along the top. Here you have it, an absolute goof-proof way to cut off a door.