Door Post

We have a few semi-minor remodeling projects going on. I say “semi-” because they’re small enough in scope that we haven’t had to vacate the premises while they’re happening, but our bank account might wish to differ on the definition.

Anyway, we’re replacing the 20+ year old gutters and having all the exterior wood surfaces and garage doors repainted. The third project is the only one that’s completed as of this writing, and it involved the replacement of our front door, another original installation when the house was constructed in the year 2000. We’ve swapped out the original wooden door and sidelights for a metal double door from Durango Doors, headquartered in Austin.

We had been thinking about this for more than a year but were a bit intimidated by not only the price but also by the prospect of having, you know, no front door for some period of time between the removal of the existing one and the installation of the new one. As it turned out, the latter concern was minimal, although the former one was completely justified.

We reached out to the folks who managed our deck and pergola construction last summer, Layne-Marcelle Builders in Kingsland. We were very pleased with their work on that project, and they were happy to take on the general contractor (“GC”) role for this one. Our initial contact was in February of this year, and we were warned to expect a long lead time for fabrication — 4-6 weeks was the initial forecast. “Long” turned out to be a pretty big understatement, but that’s business as usual in the Central Texas construction industry.

On April 11th, the Durango door installer came out to take measurements. On May 2nd, we were asked to provide our selection of door style, which we did the same day. We were notified that the fabricated door was to appear at Durango’s shop on June 19th, where it would then be fitted with the glass we’d chosen, and once the glass was installed, they’d schedule the installation. We were getting excited; how long could it possibly take to install a couple of glass panels?

*crickets*

Finally, on July 26th, I received a call from our GC saying that the door was ready and installation could start — and end, we hoped — on August 7th.

So, to recap — a tad longer than five months elapsed between our first contact to get the project rolling, and the arrival and installation of the new door. Looking back, it doesn’t seem that long. Funny how that works.

The removal of the original door went quickly, and the GC managed to salvage the indoor trim to use on the new door, alleviating one major worry. A half hour later, the Durango installers showed up and went to work. Putting the door in was a much more involved task, but the installers were pros and didn’t encounter any problems they couldn’t handle. Nevertheless, it was about a four-hour task, and that was just to get the door in place and adjusted properly. The cosmetic tasks of putting the interior and exterior trim back in place so that the door looked like it came with the house actually took two more days of on-and-off work by the GC.

“How’d it turn out?” you ask. Well, see for yourself. This is a good excuse to use the handy-dandy slider to show the before-and-after installation…just drag the yellow bar to the left to reveal the new door. (I didn’t have a suitable exterior photo of the old door, so this is the interior view.)

We spec’d the door with a Baldwin Touchscreen Z-Wave deadbolt so we could use a keypad instead of a key, and operate it remotely. It was easy to configure the keypad, but the remote capability required an upgrade to our home automation system, primarily because we didn’t have a home automation system. I hoped that we’d be able to control the lock via Alexa on our Echo Dot, but it’s too old to support that capability. I ended up ordering an Aeotec SmartThings hub and linking the lock to it. That process wasn’t flawlessly smooth, but I got it done, and the hub will help future-proof the house for any additional IOT stuff we want to install…which at this point consists of a list with nothing on it.

As they say, all’s well that ends well, and this did indeed end well. We’re quite please with the new door, both in appearance and function. But while we do like the additional privacy afforded by the rain glass, we also miss the ability to easily see what’s happening on our front porch. But, I guess that’s what a security camera is for.

My next challenging project will be to paint the little SimpliSafe entry sensor that stands out like the proverbial sore thumb at the top of the new door. I can actually think of a couple of reasons why SimpliSafe offers all of their equipment in only one color, but it’s still annoying if you somehow feel that your decor looks better without such obvious add-ons.