A reader sent me their plans a couple weeks back. Two story remodel, full permit set, the kind where somebody has clearly done their homework.

That plan already had a building permit. Approved. Stamped. Ready to build.

And three of the new doors were two foot six.

Bedroom door, closet door, bathroom door. Thirty inches each. And the owners had told me plainly that they want to live in this house into their eighties.

Nobody on that job was ever going to bring it up. The plan examiner did not care, because nothing about it is a violation. The builder frames what is drawn. The designer drew a normal door, and a two foot six door is a completely normal door.

The number that matters is not the one stamped on the door.

The accessible standard everybody works off, ADA 404.2.3, asks for 32 inches of clear width at a door. Clear width gets measured with the door open ninety degrees, from the face of the door over to the stop on the other side. The door itself is sitting in the opening while you measure.

So a door eats about two inches of its own width. Here is where that leaves you.

Now, before somebody writes in to correct me. ADA does not apply to your house. It is a public accommodation standard. Nothing on that permitted plan fails anything.

That is exactly why it is worth a paragraph. A thing that fails inspection gets caught by somebody who is paid to catch it. This one does not fail anything. So the only person who is ever going to catch it is you.

And twenty eight inches sounds like plenty. A wheelchair is roughly two feet wide. But the standard is not 32 inches because that is how wide the chair is. It is 32 because of knuckles on the push rims, and because almost nobody rolls straight through a door. You come at it out of a hallway, from the side, and you need room to turn in. Same with a walker. Same with whoever is helping.

Here is the part I did not expect when I started marking it up.

The house those owners are going to need at 85 is already drawn. It is sitting right there on the first floor.

Entry from the garage on the same level as the house, so no step coming in from the car. A full bedroom on the first floor. A full bath on the first floor. Laundry on the main floor. Lever handles instead of knobs.

That is the whole thing. That is the hard part, the expensive part, the part you cannot bolt on later. And it was already done before I ever opened the file.

And you could not get a walker through the bedroom door.

Right now, on paper, a 3'-0" door costs a few dollars more than a 2'-6" door and takes the designer about four minutes.

After framing, you are moving a king stud, cutting a new header, patching drywall on both sides, new jamb, new casing, paint, new door. If that wall is carrying something, it gets worse from there.

After somebody actually needs it, you are hiring a contractor to do all of that in a house people are living in.

And it is not always a framing change. Between the doors on that plan there were three different fixes. Stretch a cased opening where there is no door hung in it anyway. Run a pocket door where the vanity is eating the swing. Borrow a few inches off the pantry next door for the one that had nowhere else to go.

That is the real answer on door width. You are not widening the whole house. You are finding the three or four doors somebody will actually have to get through, and making those ones work.

32. Inches of clear width the accessible standard asks for. A two foot six door gives you about 28.

This one gets decided on paper, before anybody frames an opening or orders a door.

"Pull up the door schedule and show me every interior door under 3'-0". For the ones on the main floor, tell me what it costs to widen them right now, and which ones can't be."

That last part is what keeps it honest. Some of them genuinely cannot be widened, and you want to know which ones before you start arguing about it.

Something new this week. I have started putting the floor plan reviews up on YouTube, and the first one is live.

It is this plan. Fourteen minutes, room by room, the doors and about twenty other things. You watch me go through a real permitted set and mark what is missing before anybody frames anything.

Watch the 14 minute floor plan review on YouTube

The owners said yes to me using it. Their name and their address are off everything.

If you have ever wondered what one of these actually looks like before sending me your own plans, that video is the answer. It is the whole thing, start to finish, nothing held back.

Everything I write about here is the same shape. Cheap while it is still on paper, expensive the day somebody frames it. That is the entire field guide, 50 of them, with the numbers and the words to say before they close the walls.

I want to know how common this actually is. Go look at your own set before you answer.

If you know somebody whose plans are still on paper, forward this to them today. Door width is free to change right now and it never will be again.

And if one person signs up off your link, I will send you the full cost breakdown of the first house I ever built. Every line I tracked, 2017 prices, which are going to hurt to look at. It is not for sale and it never has been.

That is it for this week.

Hit reply and tell me what your door schedule says. I answer these myself.

Jon | Built With This