Out with the Floors, In with the Doors

Trissa and I went back to Frank Lumber, aka “The Door Store” this past weekend, and ordered the exterior doors for our project. Who knew there are so many choices when it comes to door selection?

We picked out three different doors: front entry, back door, and patio French doors. Not that we have a patio. Yet. All of the doors are fir, and share the same basic features and design elements, which we hope will really help to tie the house together. Here’s me with two doors that are very similar to what we picked for the front door and the back door:

One of the design elements I’m excited about is the door panels. The reveal on these panels is pretty basic, but it matches the reveal of our fireplace mantel (also fir), and I’ll continue the design to the half-wall I’m planning to build that will have built-in book cases.

One decision that we had to make was the height of these doors. The existing front door is 3’ x 7’, which is great. The existing back door is 32” x 80”, which is pretty standard but a little small for us. We decided to make all of our exterior doors 7’ tall. The result of this is an imaginary continuous line around the perimeter of the house, 7’ off the floor. This line defines the top of the doorways, and the top of the windows. I read an interesting article by Sarah Susanka that talked about the importance of horizontal continuity, so hopefully we’re executing this correctly.

In any event, the doors will take a few weeks to arrive, giving us time to prepare the rough openings. Once they do arrive we’ll have the task of applying the finish to the doors (and I understand that even choosing a finish can be a painstaking process), before we can hang them. With the growing stacks of construction materials throughout our house, I hope we’ll be able to get this all done in good time. At least the floors are gone and we can begin framing soon.