Interior Doors
August 4th, 2006
Michael Holigan: Well our project home is moving quite quickly now, the guys are in putting in the trim, and installing all of our doors. When it comes to doors you have a lot of selections. You can work with your checkbook and go by price or you can go by design and some other benefits. This is the most common door that you see in most homes, and guess why, because it’s inexpensive. This is what builders like. This is a hollow core door; it runs about $20 or $30 per door. So, as you can see, pretty inexpensive. When I say hollow core, this is why, there’s nothing in the middle. It’s actually just two panels of pressed material put together, as you can see, and there’s a little bit of flex there. You can kick through the door or put your fist through the door. I hope you don’t ever get that upset, but it is possible. Not much to the door. Here we have a simulated wood grain in the door, and we’ve got some panels that have been pressed in. Panels are nice, sort of limited though on choices because the metal plate that it takes to press and make this door with these panels, costs about a million dollars per design. And if you’re selling doors at 20 or 30 bucks, you’ve got to sell a lot of doors to get your million dollars back. So, you are going to be limited to just a few choices. You can’t stain the door, even though it has a wood simulated grain on it, you’re going to have to go ahead and paint the door, it’s not going to hold the stain and look proper. If you want to go to something that’s a little more soundproof, a little stronger, we’ve got a solid core door. This one’s slick, you can get a panel pressed into them as well. And here’s what’s in the middle of the door to make it a solid core. It’s basically just particleboard. And you have your sides, put on each end, then we’ve got a solid piece of wood on our ends. Now the reason for the solid piece of wood on the ends, because we’re going to have to put in hinges and we’re also going to have to put in a door lock system and we need something that’s solid to get into. If we put it into that particleboard, we’re going to have a problem. So we have solid wood there. This is going to be a little more expensive, this one is smooth, but like I said, you can get a panel put into it if you like. What’s real nice is you can have a trim carpenter come in and nail trim onto this and make any type of design that you’re after. But, of course, the more people that you have work on your doors, the more expensive it’s going to be, material and labor. Next to it we kind of have what everyone dreams about and that’s a solid wood door. Now when you call it a solid wood door, it’s actually a lot of solid wood pieces put together. Because of the way material and lumber is nowadays, you can’t really get a solid piece of wood, carve it out and have it remain the same size. It’s going to move and shift. So a few things are done here. We have our stiles on each end, that’s the pieces that run up and down. We have our rails, which are the pieces that run horizontal. We’ve got them at the bottom, the middle and up at the top – top rail, bottom rail and a lock rail. Part of the reason they call this a lock rail is because of these panel pieces. This is a total separate piece also, and it actually floats in between the two stiles and the two rails. It’s not glued in place, and it’s not screwed or nailed in place. It floats because the door is gonna expand and contract with moisture changes and temperature changes. And I guarantee when you stain this door, or you paint it, and you put it in your house the first time you kick on the air conditioner, it’s gonna adjust a little bit. And you’re going to see a little bit of real wood around the edges of your panel because all the pieces moving back and forth. But it is a good solid door. Our solid core door or a solid wood door is going to knock out a lot of noise, so if you have noisy kids, you might want this at least on their door or if you have a media room, put a solid door on it. Now for our house, we didn’t want to go to the expense of a door like this which would be about $500 retail, but we wanted all the benefits, so we went with what’s called a TruStile door. That’s actually a brand name. And it’s made of a medium density fiber, it’s called MDF. You can see, it’s like wood shavings. But if they put it together in layers, you get a solid piece. And here we have a panel, and we have a stile and you slide it in like so, a rail and stile, so it looks just like a solid wood door. Very, very strong, very quiet, but we don’t have as much expense, plus, it’s more rigid, more stable. When we paint this, we’re not going to have to have the painters come back in after the air conditioner’s run, because we’re not going to see a lot of expansion around here. But they are separate panels. We do have our stiles at the top and bottom, we have a rail. Here we have something a little different. We went to the expense of getting this circular design in this one. And you’re basically unlimited on designs, because they’re not pressing them in there like they are on the original ones. They can make anything that you want. Here we have more of a traditional look. But again, we have our stiles, our bottom rail, our lock rail and our top rail with just a different panel pattern. If you go with the MDF door, make sure that it does have the solid wood on the edge of both styles for your lockset and for you hinges. If you just screw into the MDF it’s going to end up tearing up in a short amount of time. When you’re choosing your doors with the MDF doors or with the solid wood doors, you can have a lot more architectural detail around your edges that you just can’t get with the pressed door. Now the solid wood doors are something you might use wherever you are really going to go heavy with stains, maybe in a study or informal rooms. If you’re going to go with painted doors, I highly recommend something like TruStile. And the great thing about the MDF material is, they didn’t have to cut down any trees. This is all waste material that they get from plywood factories and they grind it up to actually manufacture your doors. So you’re saving the environment by going with doors like this. And how many doors are in your house, I bet you can’t guess. Go around and count it up, our project house has 35 doors. So if we can save a little money per door and still have those great looks, it’s well worth the investment.
Entry Filed under: Trustile
