Widen an Interior Doorway to 36 Inches for Real Clearance
A 28-inch bedroom door is a wall to a wheelchair or a walker. In a non-bearing partition, widening it to 36 inches is a weekend of framing, drywall, and trim.
Accessibility guidelines call for a 32-inch clear opening, and a 36-inch door is what actually delivers it once the slab and stops eat their share. Most bedroom and bathroom doors in older houses are 28 or 30 inches, which leaves a wheelchair user scraping knuckles or shut out. Widening the opening is honest carpentry, but it starts with a question you must answer correctly: is this wall carrying anything?
Prove the wall is non-bearing first
Go into the attic or basement and look at what sits above and below the wall. Joists running parallel to it, nothing stacked above, and a single top plate all point to a partition. Joists landing on it or a doubled top plate with a wall or beam above mean it is bearing, which changes the header, the temporary support, and the permit. If you cannot see the framing clearly, pay an engineer for an hour rather than guess. Then decide which way to grow: moving the latch side keeps the hinges and the light switch where they are.
Strip the opening
Pull the casing with a flat bar, cut the jamb nails with a multi-tool, and lift the old frame out. Snap a plumb line 8 inches past the existing rough opening on the side you are moving. Score and remove the drywall on both faces from floor to a foot above the header. Check the cavity for wires and pipes before any saw goes in.
Cut out the old king and jack
Cut the old jack and king studs free from the plates with a reciprocating saw and pry them out, then cut leftover nails flush. Keep the existing header only if it spans the new width with 1.5 inches of bearing each end; otherwise plan a doubled 2×6 header, standard for a 36-inch partition opening.
Frame the new side
The rough opening for a 36-inch prehung door is 38 inches wide by 82.5 inches tall. Set a new king stud plumb from bottom plate to top plate and fasten it with three nails or screws at each end. Cut the jack stud to the header height, nail it to the king stud every 12 inches, and set the header on top, toenailed into the king and nailed through the jack. Add a cripple above the header to the top plate.
Patch drywall and hang the door
Cover the exposed framing with half-inch drywall, tape and float with three thinning coats, and sand to 120 grit. Set the prehung unit, shim behind the hinge jamb until it is dead plumb, and drive finish nails through the shims. An even eighth-inch reveal around the slab means the door will latch without a shoulder.
Recase and finish
Cut casing with tight miters, hold a quarter-inch reveal on the jamb, and nail every 16 inches. Fill, caulk, prime, and paint. Offset hinges add another 1.5 inches of clear width, and a lever handle finishes the job.
A switch box inside your new opening has to move, and that is where a simple project quietly becomes electrical work under permit. Kill the breaker, test it dead, and relocate the box before the drywall closes. If the wall turns out to carry load, stop and get a header sized by an engineer.
The door is thirty-six inches. The independence it buys is not measurable.
After the dust settles
Flooring that stopped at the old jamb now shows a strip of subfloor; a flush transition or matching threshold closes it. Adjust the strike plate after a week when the framing has relaxed. A wider door is one of the few accessibility changes that reads as a design upgrade rather than a medical one, which is why it adds value even if nobody in the house ever needs it.
Keep the momentum going
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