The doors of the outside of your home should be solid or of panel construction. Ideally, at least one exterior door should be large enough to allow you to move large appliances or pieces of furniture in and out of the house. Many needless injuries have occurred because people try and move things that are either too heavy or too large through the space provided. When inspecting a house for the first time, each door should be opened and closed several times. Even if the door seems to fit properly, look carefully to see if the tops or bottoms have been planed to accommodate any irregular shapes.
You should also know that door jambs in partition walls tend to be more out of square than jambs in load bearing walls. While this does not constitute a major problem, if the door jamb in a load bearing wall has moved significantly, it usually means there is major structural damage. One way to check this is to go to the basement and look at the basement walls wherever possible to see if any cracks are present. Structural damage more often than not shows up in this manner.
The steel exterior doors in many new homes are quite often filled with insulation. Although there are few problems with a metal door, some of the lesser quality models tend to warp when there is an extreme temperature difference between the inside and the outside. The colder side of the door can contract while the warmer side expands, and this can cause the door to bow. Because they cannot be planed down, metal doors also present a problem as the house settles. As well, it is relatively easy to shave down a wooden door, modifying a metal door to compensate for movement of the door frame is more difficult. Many metal doors have plastic decorative trim fastened to the metal and this can warp under the pressures of extreme heat.
The experts suggest that it is helpful to look at an exterior door as essentially a hole in your wall that needs to be plugged. To these people, a door presents all the problems associated with construction joints and heat loss. You’ll also need to decide about the placements of any windows in doors when you shop. Essentially, this could be considered a privacy issue. Some doors offer windows as high as 3 feet while others only offer a crescent at the top just above eye level. It is suggested that with some of the solid doors on the market today, the homeowner include a peephole for security reasons.
Wooden exterior doors are still available in a tremendous variety of qualities and most people still choose wood with some kind of capping. Generally, larger doors are indicative of better built homes. No matter what kind of door you choose, it is important that you get the proper fit into the door frame to ensure maximum security and the best in insulation.
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