Anyone living on the hill in Forest Heights can tell you that the weather moving in from the southwest often blows up hill.

Wood doors are sorely tested in these conditions. In this case, the water was coming through between the stiles & rails.

This Jeld-Wen Fiberglass door from their Aurora line will not have that problem.

Made to look like a wood plank door, I can assure you that the untrained eye will not likely discern that it is not real wood.

Many folks do not know that fiberglass doors can be cut down in width and height to fit into existing jamb assemblies, as we did here.

In fact, we installed a zinc weatherstripping hook for use with the client’s original interlocking threshold.

We mortise for hinges and bore for the locks on-site to match existing hinge and lock locations on the jamb.

This is nice looking door both inside…

…and out.

No more front door problems for this house.

A sample of S.E. Portland’s finest residential classics.

It’s time for a slightly improved first impression.

The Simpson 6861 Fir with Dentil Shelf. Hung into the original jamb.

Interior Before Shot.

Interior After Shot.

Exterior After Shot. As some of you can see, we re-installed the original door-bell.

Ill-fitting Flush Steel Doors in Gresham make for a sterile & drafty main entry.

Fiberglass doors have certainly grown in popularity over the past several decades. They’re even more impervious to the elements than steel, they can simulate wood with their embossed wood-grain and can even be stained to varying shades by virtue of the invention of “gel-stains.”
Therma-Tru and Masonite are two very popular brands in our region.

Our client had an heirloom piece art-glass piece that they wanted incorporated into a new front door. So we worked with them in coming up with a unique design. The piece was a little too big to center in the door. There wouldn’t be enough room for two flanking panels, and filling-in the balance with ultra wide stiles would not have worked either.

So we offset the art-glass piece in the door, and filled-in the balance with a piece of beveled glass with matching panels with raised-molding below. The result in our opinion was a truly unique and artistic door. As you may be able to discern, we hung the new door into the original door-jamb.

For reasons I do not recall, I apparently did not acquire a ?before? shot from the exterior.

As you may or may not be able to make out in these relatively small photos, the client had some narrow-reed obscure glass in his sidelight.

And he wanted a door to match. The new wood door was machined on-site to fit the original jamb assembly.

As has been observed many times by many folks for many years, a home’s main-entry or front door is often seen as a centerpiece and/or a visitor’s first impression.

Notice how the extra wide, sculpted exterior trim enhances what might otherwise be seen as an out of place door. Somehow, it seems to lend legitimacy to the fancy door being there.

Geometrically balanced door panel patterns probably inspire me the least. Going from an 8-flat-panel configuration to a 15-panel configuration seems as though the change might not even be noticed.

This door may have ended up looking better once it was painted, depending upon how they painted it. But as it is…the raised panels and the raised moulding around the panels almost aren’t enough to say that it was an improvement. A bit boring.

Speaking of balanced panel patterns…well at least it’s an uneven number of panels, except that they aren’t really panels. They’re just rectangles made out of applied trim to look like panels from a distance. If the veneer beneath the rectangles had some creative faux paint pattern that offset the naturally finished faux panels, it might get by as an updated version of 1960’s retro or something.

This door doesn’t really fit the nondescript ranch house, and the router-carved scrollwork on the lock rail is very 1980s. But the four-panel configuration with the raised moulding and the eyebrow shape (hard to see) at the top of the top two taller panels will always be one of my favorite stile and rail doors. It’s a classic that will go out of style because of how popular it once was, but its popularity will return. If interested, go Simpson’s website (simpsondoor.com) an put #48 into their “search” feature, and that’ll show you an interior version of the door without the raised moulding around the panels.

This house was a do-it-yourself project. The owners would save up their pennies until they had enough to do a little more. This flush veneer door was to serve as what is known as a dunnage-door, which is to say, a temporary door, until such time as they had enough pennies to pay for the door they really wanted, which is why the dunnage door was never painted.

This became a popular door model when it was first introduced maybe around the early 1990s. It works fairly well on the modern, contemporary types of architecture, or something along the lines of Miami Vice architecture, and I think it goes fairly well with the glass-block shown here, but it strikes this door critic as being a bit too Aztecian or Mayanian for my tastes, if you know what I mean.

From plain-Jane to…

…Susie-sophistication.

Time for a front entry face lift for this Lake Oswego ranch-style house.

Original Door & Sidelights. Our client wanted some glass in his new door that would match the art-glass we were going to install into the sidelights.

In order to avoid the cost of having someone build custom-sized art-glass units made for our client’s original direct-glazed sidelight openings…

..our technicians Doug & Nate built some custom-sized sidelight sash on-site that facilitated our installing the new, smaller, “stock-sized” glass inserts that we purchased from Simpson into our client’s existing sidelight openings.

A third option would have been to rebuild the “rough-opening” to facilitate a couple stock-sized sidelight sash built by Simpson Door. That would have required replacing the jamb assembly as well. Reusing the original rough-opening AND jamb-assembly was the most economical.

This is Simpson’s Venetia II Model 4224 door w/ brass-caming. This photo shows one of the new sidelights installed.

This close-up after-shot shows the brass-caming in the art-glass that happens to match the brass interlocking weather-stripping we installed on the door.

Among the poorest quality doors of all time, is the mobile home fiberglass door. Not to be confused with your standard residential fiberglass door, these doors are in a class all by themselves.

This new fir/hemlock stile & rail door with etched-glass probably increased the curb-appeal of this residence by 85%, given the context of the surrounding competition in this neighborhood.