The past few weekends have been consumed by doors. We are in the act of replacing the side door and the front door of our house. First of all, doors are complicated. I actually managed to rebuild a VW engine in about the same amount of time it has taken me to finish and install 2 new doors. The most complex aspect of wood doors is the finish, I didn’t quite realize what a chore it was to finish exterior doors. The doors are made of a laminate, so they require oil-based finishes — that’s painful. The side door got a coat of oil-based primer, and then three coats of nice exterior oil-based paint. Of course each coat takes 8 to 12 hours to dry in this climate, so that took awhile. However the front door, which has a nice cherry stain on it, took 24 hours for the stain to dry and then required SEVEN coats of teak-oil. Of course each coat takes 24 hours to dry with the last coat taking 48 hours. Then there is all the hardware to install. The side door was too wide, the front door too narrow. After a lot of sanding, the side door closes very “snuggly”. However when a door is too narrow, it becomes a major project to “fix it up”. I managed to get a piece of molding that made up the difference, but the problem with that is the door “jiggles” in the frame if the deadbolt isn’t engaged. It took 3 tries (1 hour each) of fiddling with the deadbolt hardware to get the front door to seal without jiggling. (When the wind blows up here in the winter, it would be really annoying to have the front door moving about in it’s frame).
I am finally seeing the light at the end of this long corridor (someone had to have left the door open). The doors look great, the hardware works, and they don’t let in cold drafts and rain. Given that the old doors did all of the above, I think it is a great improvement.