Drafty doors....

I've been struggling with minimizing my heat and electric bills at my home.  I do have a pretty ancient heating and cooling system that I have checked annually by a technician and so far although not the most efficient, it is still running fairly well.  Besides replacing some of the doors and windows, the second year in my home I added additional insulation bats to my attic and this past year I replaced the insulation in my crawl space.  Both have helped reduce my heating and cooling costs but one thing that has bothered me was the gaps around my doors.  I've tried several times to put foam strips around them but my pets tend to like to claw at this and I end up replacing it fairly often around the lower part of the doors.  
The three amigos in their favorite window seat

 I have been contemplating installing a storm door at the front door which is the worst for drafts.  Every time I come down the stairs I see this gap around the front door.  Today the thought came to me that perhaps the problem wasn't the strips around the door (which seemed in good condition) but the fact that the door just wasn't closed enough.  To my delight, I found that if I removed the strike plates for both the door handle and the dead bolt and slightly moved them further in, voila!... the door now closes properly and there aren't any gaps.


You can see from the above picture how little I moved the plate back.  I simply restarted new screw holes with a power drill and re-screwed the plate back on.  A quick touch up with white paint and I'm done.    I then looked at the door from my garage and realized the same problem.  Whomever initially installed the doors, just didn't put the plates back far enough causing the doors to not close tightly against the weather stripping.  Much cheaper (free) fix to my door problems than having to install storm doors. 

Fortunately for me the hole that the door latch and deadbolt go into were deep enough that I didn't have to do anything with them but if they weren't in the right location I could have easily chipped them out with a wood chisel.  Yes, I am lucky that I got all the tools in the divorce!  Didn't know that I would be needing them but they have been a blessing.

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