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October 26, 2006
Prairie winters & exterior doors
When we took possession of our house, it had all its original exterior doors, not a single one of which was in very good shape. We had to remove the raised panel, cedar door from the mudroom in early December. We replaced it with a new, nine-light, insulated, pre-hung steel door.
But, there were good reasons for this seeming sacrilege. Our primary concern was air leakage. It's not uncommon, here, for it to get to -40C (-40F) in the winter, and it is perfectly capable of hitting temperatures as low as -65C (-76F) with the windchill. In short, it can get pretty damn cold. And, while I loved the look of the original back door, it just wasn't practical to keep it . . . especially when, in early December, it had a good 1/2" coat of frost growing on it (and it hadn't even hit -20C yet).
Next came the front door. We bought a pair of heritage storm doors from Emco, both of which have self-storing glass & screens. They're not an exact match to the 12-light cedar storm doors that the house originally had (of which we currently only have one, as the back storm door is mysteriously missing), but they're as close as we could come and still get all of the advantages of the newer storm doors.
The original front door is a craftsman style door, with a single, almost-square, window and three recessed panels. The center panel is cracked to the extent that you can actually see the outside world through it while sitting in the old front porch. It's entirely fixable (with more than a little work), but the thin recessed panels provide little in terms of insulation . . . a fact that we discovered early last winter. So, with yet another sigh, we purchased yet another insulated steel door, although this time with a 9-light-sized stained glass-style insert.
We dearly would have loved to have kept all three remaining original doors, but it just wasn't practical to do so in this climate. Even once the house has achieved a good frost seal, it was still far too cold in here last winter. The two entry doors were going to continue to present a problem, even with insulating the basement inside & out, replacing all of the basement windows, and the planned insulation of and sealing* around the main floor windows that aren't presently being replaced.
So there, I've admitted it, we've committed one of the sins for which people often curse the previous owners of their homes. But, at least we'll re-use the doors elsewhere. The one remaining original storm door is in really rough shape, as the door-handle side stile is nowhere even close to sound. Unfortunately, I don't think we're going to be able to salvage this one. However, despite their rough shape, we're going to be able to re-use the original back and front doors. The back door, a heavy cedar raised-panel door, will go on the basement workshop, once it's reassembled from the bits and pieces to which it's currently reduced. The front door, once the center panel has been fixed and the glass frosted, will likely reside upstairs. In addition to this, we've obtained a functional fir storm door, which is destined, after stripping, refinishing, and glass frosting, to become the door for the new master bedrom. So, it's not as if we're shipping them off to the dump or something . . . we're just giving them new jobs to do.
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* A brief note re. sealing: We've been using a product that is often referred to as "blueskin" throughout the course of our exterior renovations. It's a self-adhering flashing, blue on the sticky side, that seals out drafts better than any other product we've seen on the market (and, considering that my father's been in the home improvement/building supply industry for 37 years, that's saying a lot). It's worked wonders on the areas of the house that we've managed to seal thus far.
Posted by plainstext at October 26, 2006 05:27 PM
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