DOORS GALORE! HOW TO CHOOSE A FRONT DOOR WITH SO MANY OPTIONS
Your front door sets the tone and personality of your entire home. It faces the street, and is the entryway through which you, your family, and all your guests gain access to the house. Everyone who comes to visit will first walk past your front door.
Even if they don’t consciously take note, the impression your door leaves will colour their perception of your entire home, so naturally, you want to make a good first impression. The good news is that you have a nearly infinite number of ways to combine material, style, and colour for your front door, but the challenge then becomes making your final decision.
Don’t to Get Overwhelmed
When you first decided to remodel, it probably didn’t occur to you that choosing the front door of all things would be so hard. After all, it’s only a door, right? Of course, as you walk past the rows and rows of doors in your local home improvement venue, it becomes obvious that choosing a door involves a lot more than simply replacing the old one. Besides choosing a door that fits in your aperture, you begin to realise that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of unique entry door options to choose from and most people don’t really know where to start. The first step to choosing the perfect door is not to get overwhelmed. Rather than trying to choose in the store, surrounded by that impersonal ‘doors r us’ feeling like standing in an endless warehouse of doors, consider doing your initial decision making at home with online research.
Security Comes First
Style and colour are important, but as you have just witnessed, almost any kind of door can be made with most styles and then painted or stained to whatever colour you desire. However, your first concern should always be the security of your home. There’s a reason exterior doors are heavy and solid, unlike hollow-core interior doors. To ensure that the primary entrance to your home is safe, make sure you start by choosing a material or composite of materials that suits your security needs. Many people prefer solid timber doors made from hardened woods while others prefer ‘modern’ custom crafted materials like composite fibreglass or powder-coated aluminium.
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Accounting for Weather and Activities
Now that you’ve decided what you need from the security of your door, it’s time to consider the kind of weather and other wear-and-tear conditions you’ll be dealing with. Wooden doors are elegant and easy to sand and re-finish should they get scratched, but they are also more susceptible to moisture. Even if effectively weather sealed, wood doors tend to swell when humidity rises and shrink in cold, dry air. Composite fibreglass doors are incredibly durable and weather resistant, capable of withstanding extreme weather conditions with very little sign of wear-and-tear. Of course, if you have an active family that goes in and out all the time, you might want to consider an aluminium door, as the powder coating, especially Mannex finish, is uniquely scuff-resistant no matter how many shoes kick the door open, closed, or brush past in a hurry.
Grooves and Windows
Once you have decided on a material, the most unique feature of any door is the design created by a dynamic combination of grooves and windows. Now is the time to look at your personal stylistic preferences and how you want your home to present itself. Your door style doesn’t have to ‘match’ your home because it will shape the style of the home itself. A traditional wood door with elegant stained glass windows can add class even to a condo in a shared building while even the most traditionally built home can display a flare for style with a more modern door design.
If you have always imagined yourself with a cosy farmhouse door with panels and perhaps an arch-window at the top, now is your chance to make your dream a reality. However, if you like the sleek look of modern designs and would prefer an interesting set of vertical or even square windows along one side of your door, you can have that too. If you have a double-sized opening, you can even have French doors plus attractive curtains behind the segmented windows. As there are so many options readily available, it may help to draw the door of your dreams, then find the perfect match rather than trying to choose from an endless display screaming ‘doors r us’.
Choosing the Perfect Door Colour
Despite all the other choices available, the colour of your front door is the most unique and personality-revealing part of your decisions making process. Some people match their door colour to the trim on their home, others choose a door colour and paint the trim to match. Many people choose something entirely unique and somewhat surprising just for their front door while others prefer an understated natural wood finish.
Dark or light, bright or natural, how you paint your front door is entirely up to you, but your starting material matters. If you don’t want to paint the door, a dark wood or shiny metal might be a better choice, while a light-coloured door will allow painted doors to have fewer coats. You should also consider whether or not you’ll be painting your door red when you pay off the mortgage, as this is a popular and celebratory home-owner tradition.
What will your new front door look like? In the ocean of door options available to you, only you can know that. Just remember that in a world of doors, you have the freedom to shop online in the comfort of your own home, draw the door of your dreams and look for a match, then paint whatever you decide to match your favourite colours. When you’re finished, your front door will be a perfect representation of your personality and ideal home.
