Every Thursday is Goat-Free Simplicity day at Living Behind the Curve.
Since Thursday is simplicity day, I’ve got a real simple post for you. Remember the door we were supposed to buy? We didn’t buy it yet. We got an $800 dollar estimate from Lowes, and after several weeks and some breathtakingly bad customer service, I went over to Home Depot to see what they could do for me. The door guy came out and looked at it, and gave me a call to say that it’ll take a little more than the standard installation fee to get the door installed, but it shouldn’t be any problem.
I returned to HD tonight on my way home to sign the papers and pay for my door and get everything all settles. Apparently, “a little more” means doubling the standard install rate, and it’ll cost me almost a thousand dollars to install a stock door that costs $169. Even the salesman said it wasn’t worth it. So? Still no new door.
Dani and I discussed it, and we have a couple of options. We could call our mason and have him raise the height of the rough doorway, which is what’s making everything so complicated, and then just get a stock door installed. We could get a third opinion, and see exactly why the measurements from Lowes and Home Depot were so wildly different, and see if an indie installer doesn’t have his head up his ass. Or, we also considered sealing up the back door and walling up the garage, installing an extra-wide door there so we can refinish that part of the basement and move everything around so the layout actually makes sense.
Obviously there’s still a lot of talking and planning to go into this decision, but I want some outside opinions. What do you folks think would be the smart move?
Categories: emergency fund| goat-free simplicity| home improvement| simplicity
For the purchase of the door, I reccomend Heeby’s. It’s in Blandon, so it IS a bit of a drive, but their stuff is WAY cheaper that at HD or Lowes. We got farmhouse style core doors for the whole upstairs…at HD they are 48 dollars each, at heeby’s? 15.
I suggest asking the Mason to raise the threshold. that’s what I would do, THEN find a local, independant contractor and have HIM put the door in. Trust me…have someone other than yourselves put that door in. It’s migrain inducing for the wooden doors in the house, I can’t imagine how difficult a metal door would be.
I was going to recommend Heeby’s too. Exterior doors with stained-glass insets are less than $200 there, so a plain door can’t be that expensive!
As for installing it, if you’re not ripping out the old frame you can probably manage the installation yourself with a lot of hard work and probably some swearing. Otherwise, hire a local handy-man who can probably do it fairly cheap.
$1000 for a door is friggen rediculous, IMHO.
Geez I use the word “probably” a lot.
Going just on what you said in your post, I would go for sealing up the door and re-doing it so that part of the house so it makes sense. In the long run, it seems like that would really pay off in terms of the use you’d get out of it, and it might also increase the house’s value and/or desirability should you decide to sell.
@ Jen and Ann: I will definitely give Heeby’s a call and see what they can do for me door-wise. Unfortunately, because it appears that a nonprofessional tried to make something fit, the whole frame needs to go, too. Besides, it’s been painted and repainted over cracked paint and the frame is just a mess. And then, off to find a carpenter.
@ CFO: I am leaning towards that option, but it will make my house pretty vastly different from everyone else on the block, and I need to consult with a professional to see if giving up my garage for an extra room will negatively impact my home’s value. it’s also a much more expensive move in the long run, so it’s a tough decision. Since I live in basically a nice row house priced as a starter home or a rental property, it’s tough deciding what’s “too much” improvement. I really want to avoid being the nicest house on the block by 20%, yanno?
Mer, if I’m reading this right, the door needs to be replaced *eventually,* but the real problem du jour is the gap at the bottom, right? What about leaving the door alone for now and installing a new aluminum threshold? Looking at the photo, I don’t see the exterior threshhold that I see on my own doors that I’ve hung. An aluminum threshold, combined with a new sweep on the bottom of the door to seal it, should solve your furry critter and leak problems without any other headaches. And you can do it yourself, and a lot cheaper than a grand worth of new door. Labor’s always the most expensive part, and if the door opening needs to be adjusted, that’s where the problem is. Sounds like the original door was hung too high in the rough opening (maybe to accomodate carpeting on the interior?) A new threshold might buy you a year or three to save for a new door without breaking the bank. You might have to take the door off its hinges to install a new sweep, although we didn’t when we did ours two months ago, but it’s still not hard to do.
BTW, if you *do* decide to seal up the door, make sure it’s to code to do it. Eliminating exits from a home is never a good idea, and might not be legal….fire exits and all that.
@ N’Awlins Kat: Heh. Ok, first off, that’s a stock photo. Second of all, yes, the gap is the problem and yes, the door still acts mostly doorlike on most days, but it does need to go. We did consinder installing a threshold and sweep down there, but we discovered a couple of barriers to that. First, the door is severely warped, which makes everything more complicated. Second, the doorway is an odd size, which means we have to custom-cut the metal threshold and sweep to fit, which means buying or renting metal-cutting tools we don’t have. and finally, the bottom of the threshold is actually a 4 or 6 inch slab of concrete, which means more tools to deal with that.
doing a sweep and new threshold is the first thing we thought of, but once we looked at what it would actually take to do it ourselves, it was only a hundred bucks less than a stock door and a base installation charge.
Ummmm….Mer? Sell the money pit! Seriously, I know the feeling. Our house flooded 12 years ago (w/o flood insurance…uggh), so we have learned way more than we ever wanted to know about construction. Sorry about your door. I can say that you will eventually wind up with a very cool tool collection, though! Probably not what you wanted to hear…..
@ N’Awlins Kat: *laughs* It’s really not too bad. Aside from the unexpected guests, none of the repairs we’ve done, or are planning on doing, weren’t glaringly obvious when we bought the place. It’s still a pain in the neck, but thankfully, we haven’t been rudely surprised by anything worse than a frozen water pipe over the winter.
@Mer–no surprises is good. Periodically (like every day at least once), I look around my castle, sigh and ask, “for this, I gave up half a grad school dorm room?” And my husband and daughter are not amused…..