Daily Home Renovation Tips

For those frequent visitors to our site, you have read every now and again about our adventures in replacing the front door to our house. We actually thought that it would be finished by now.

After more than 5 months, it is not. Now, something else has occurred.

So, rather than waiting and waiting, we are going to start our new series of articles about our new exterior replacement door.

And, as you have seen from our previous articles, if ‘it’ can happen to anyone likely ‘it’ will happen to us. We are sure that your adventures with your replacement exterior front door will be, well, less adventurous than ours.

Let’s start at the beginning, shall we?

In early September, the fall season had started to bring in cooler days and evenings. On windy days we could feel the cool air entering the house from the front door, even when it was locked. Yes, it was not overly energy efficient.

As well, the door itself had no windows with the side lights on either side providing only minimal light into the main hall. Lastly, the windows in those side lights were clear, so anyone could look directly into our main hall, through our kitchen and eating area and out to the back of the house. It was time for us to consider replacing the front door.

Here’s the door as it was when we purchased the house. The black sides were painted by us as our plan was to originally just paint the door and sides black. We only got so far as the sides when we realized that we needed to replace the 20 year old door.

Then on the weekend, there was a flyer in the local newspaper stating that one of the local big box building supply stores was having a 20% sale on external doors. And, if that was not enough motivation for us, we would also not have to pay for 12 months, no interest. Sold. We felt safe going with the big box building supply store.

So, on Thursday September 13, 2007, during my lunch, we (Catherine and I) went to the big box building supply store, armed with the flyer and measurements of the door entrance. We knew we wanted to address the above mentioned issues we had with the current door, but had no other knowledge. We had never done this before (like most of the renovations we had undertaken on our home), so everything was new to us.

When we looked at the different models in the door section of the store and talked with the sales associate, we were told that ”You can, but I don’t really recommend you order the door today.” We were also told by the sales associate “The sales price is only for doors ordered this weekend.”

Return tomorrow for what that how we dealt with our first learning event in our quest for our new front door.

Oh, and in case you are one of those who likes to skip to the end of the book to see how it ends, we can show you the door currently installed in the front of our home. Remember, the installation is still not finished 6+ months after we first went to order the door.

To continue with the next article in this series, simply select this link to Part 2 - The Measurements.