Your New Home And Choosing the Right Doors
When you are building your own home, or contracting it to be built, the selection of the right doors is critical. When we built our home I found out that you can save on quality doors if you spend some time doing research. I would like to discuss some of your options when selecting the right doors in this article.
The Right Price for Your Doors
When we built our home, I had as most of you do, a budget, so finding quality doors at the right price was essential. My wife and I visited the home centers and specialty door shops but when we added the bill up for all the doors for our house, we knew we needed to find a wholesale supplier.
We visited local houses that were being built and found out where the big builders were buying their doors and priced out doors there. We saved around 40% doing this. You can find out where the General Contractors buy their doors by going to the home sites and watching who delivers the doors to the houses. They usually have their trucks marked proudly.
I know that this sounds like a pain but think about the thousands of dollars you will save doing so. You’ve got to buy doors…. right?
What are the Right Doors for Your New Home?
I can’t help you with the specifics of choosing the doors for your home but I can help you choose general categories of doors. Your budget and taste will be the main factors in choosing doors for your new home. I will give you the criteria for buying doors for my house.
I choose metal doors for the outside of the home we built. I have owned several homes and they have had different types of doors including wood, fiberglass and metal. I found that wood exterior doors required more maintenance because wood is subject to weathering. If you live in a humid climate, wood doors will also swell and contract according to the climate, making the doors stick when it is humid. Needless to say, sticking doors is a real pain and the glass can break as someone tries to shove the door open!
Fiberglass doors were more expensive when we bought our home this is why I choose metal doors. Metal doors are not metal thru and thru. They are metal on the outside on top of a wood frame with a Styrofoam core in the center. This makes them very energy efficient. But some fiberglass doors are made to resemble wood.
The metal doors we chose were from a local company that purchased the doors in bulk and then sized them to order. They also cut out the door hardware openings to our request. In other words, if a customer wanted dead bolts and standard door hardware they came with two standard holes for the hardware.
You may want to also consider having your doors open “out” instead of in for added security (doors that open out have the door pins concealed and are harder to kick in) and more room inside the house. (This has to be decided before the door jams are installed.) Some building codes also require that all exterior doors open out to make exiting the premises easier in case of a fire. Check with your local building codes.
