What to Look for When Upgrading Your Front Door

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Where to buy

Apart from making your door with your own tools and shop, which you can try to do, front entry doors can be bought through several channels. Most easily accessible are the major home improvement megastores such as Home Depot. But at smaller places, like private millwork stores, doors can be custom crafted to order.

Several companies are also in the specialty business of creating doors, with a lot of options for customization and material types. Finally, basic material supply locations such as lumberyards have been known to fashion bare-bones doors which the end-consumer can take home and customize with some amount of effort.

Specialty locations for fiberglass doors

The big companies which are in the business of making fiberglass entry doors include famous ones such as Thermatru or Premdor. The latter is an umbrella conglomeration that manages smaller businesses localized to different regions of the U.S. which complement each other by focusing on one particular fiberglass entry door type. The regional companies cross polinate by shipping their wares across the country to more local distributors and end-retailers.

Measure your door

Before contacting these companies, or before making your own fiberglass door, one must make the requisite measu rements of the current door’s length, width and depth (or thickness). The height is very standardized at 6′8″, while the thickness is also standardized to be 1 3/4″. The width is more variable depending on the size of the house or the style of the entrance way.

Consider an entry system

Nowadays, most people not only replace the fiberglass entry doors itself but also the frame (known as the jamb) as well as add-ons such as sidelights. Sidelights flank the main fiberglass entry door and give an extra sense of style or touch to the house. In most cases, replacing the fiberglass entry door in addition to the jamb can be done with a complete entry system. The additional work is to measure the jamb dimensions. There is one more door property that needs to be recorded. Each door can come in two flavors of “handedness”. While standing on the inside of the structure, check which side the door knob is on. If the doorknob is on the right hand side, then the door is categorized as a “right hand door”. Conversely, if the doorknob is on the left, the door iscategorized as a “left hand door”.

Consider other types of doors

This website is about fiberglass entry doors, but some words of advice on buying other types of doors are in order. If buying a wooden door, ensure that you have one constructed of high quality wood and coated with durable finish. Ensure the detailing is artistic and to specification.

Ensure quality of individual components

One thing to keep in mind about complete entry systems is that they are multicomponent objects. The door itself , paneling, details, as well as sidelights and jambs can be produced by separate manufacturers, which is then pi eced together by the outsourcing distributor. The quality of the whole is only as great as the component of low est quality. Ensure that the individual manufacturers have created a fine product by checking that the pieces fit together. Of note, make sure that the weather stripping seals at the bottom of the door effect meshes with the threshhold.

Insulating properties

Many fiberglass entry doors have at the center one or more panels of glass (usually not clearly transparent). If the glass surface area is large, there can be high radiative heat transfer. To lower the heat transfer, which is vital in cold climates and less so in warm ones, a thin layer of oxide coating is usually placed on the surface of the glass. This coating is known as low-E glazing. Such a coating will help insulate a home and reduce the heat leakage through the fiberglass entry doors glass. Glass with properties that leave it less vulnerable to shattering is also desirable for the purpose of home securing.

Reducing heat loss

Finally keep in mind that unlike wooden doors, fiberglass entry doors will leak some heat that can be plugged wi th a “thermal break”. This is simply a layer of material which reduces the heat loss. Again, like low-E glazin g, these accoutrements can make a difference in preserving ambient heat during low temperatures.