Well shit, then you’re barely getting any sun on the door. Go for wood, and don’t buy one from the sales person who tried to scare you into buying one of his steel doors!
If possible, make sure the door is sealed on all SIX sides before installation. Use real spar urethane varnish if there’s any exposure at all.
/painting contractor
Snippiness unintended. Having a bad day. You already realize the point I was going to make, these are marketing claims from steel door manufacturers. For any sufficiently strong door the latch and bolt are the key security features. And if you want to break into a house, the front door is usually the most difficult way to get in (if it’s locked).
Contractor here. I, too, would recommend not getting a wood door. Expensive, prone to warping, cracking, expanding and contracting in heat/cold. No one likes to go back year after year and screw around with a wooden door.
There are some really nice fiberglass/steel that are historically correct, have a great finish on them , and are very high quality.
We’ve installed some of these, with a gel coat stain applied on site. Look fantastic.
Missed the edit window.
We’ve worked on houses with $8,000-$12,000 fancy wooden front doors. Most had issues.
Let me put it this way-I live in a very, very nice house, and would never dream of installing an exterior wood door. Not worth it, especially with the options available today.
I would generally agree, unless you have an all wood house anyway. A wood door isn’t going to do much for the look of a vinyl sided house. Though they may not be quite as bad as you make them sound. Expansion/contraction and warping is a bigger problem than cracking, and makes them more difficult to seal airtight.
Most of the wood/high quality fiberglass doors we’ve installed have been on hardie, cedar or brick houses.
You’re right, not worth it on most vinyl houses.
Thanks for more to think about. Our house is a brick 1920s rowhouse. The salesman did show us a fiberglass door with a wood grain finish, but I would prefer the wood door. Although our porch is covered, we are on a hill and during the second half of the day, we get a good blast of sunlight right onto the porch, to the point that we don’t really sit out there in the late afternoon until the sun dips behind the skyline. I told them we’d have an answer this evening, but I’m still not sure.
Our door faces west and gets baked by very hot sun. When we had a wooden door, the varnish eventually came off from the heat. It was probably 15 years old, maybe less. The wood got bleached and sun-damaged. We got a door that looks like wood but is really made of some miracle material. You can’t tell unless you touch it, and it stands up to anything.
I’d be tempted to go this direction. I have a wooden door that faces southish, and gets full sun, and it’s just been a huge problem. The big issue is expansion and contraction, which causes gaps to open up, which lets in water, which leads to disintegration and rot. The real problem is that wood doors are generally of fairly crappy construction – low-grade pine skinned over with veneer, so once the outside is breached, they degrade to rubbish in fairly short order.
In truth, doors should be made only of solid, quarter-sawn wood, which experiences dramatically less seasonal expansion and contraction. But this, alas, is one of those verities that disappeared with the 19th century. The best you can do these days, I suppose, is get fiberglass painted to look like wood. Ironically, fiberglass looks a lot more like wood when it doesn’t have the faux wood grain texture.
I have wooden doors in the whole house. A metal door would look incredibly dumb on my house. While I love my doors, they do have a huge problem. They are thick and heavy and solid but when they expand in the hot weather, they are a massive bitch and a half to open. With that problem aside, the doors are awesome.
Truth be told, the link I gave you really doesn’t do the fiberglass doors justice.
If you want the best result for looking like a wooden door, you have to stain it yourself/painter, and it’ll take a couple of coats.
Find a contractor or painter that has done these before, and ask to look at the finished product, even if that means going at looking at someone’s house. Look at different kinds of texture in the door, some wood grain looks very nice, some looks cheesy.
Now if durability is what you are after, I’d go with factory finish-it’s always a more controlled environment, and it should have some kind of warranty on it.These turn out pretty nice as well.
My wooden front door (DC area) faces south under a porch roof, and it’s had no issues in the five years that I’ve been here. The house is eighty+ years old, but I don’t know how old the door is.
I wasn’t aware of these and I have to admit, they look very very good.
I wouldn’t consider a wooden door. The cheap ones you get what you pay for, they are very prone to warping and cracking. The expensive ones are prohibitively expensive, well beyond what I consider reasonable.
The options available in steel and fiberglass are so much cheaper and can look wonderful on any house.
Thanks for the advice. I think we might just not get a new door, in the end; it’s better to know that now, then after we plunked down some cash.
I just wanted to represent for the anti-steel door faction. Our house faces directly east and the steel front door gets a full blast of sunrise every morning. Everyone in the house has been burned. Since the problem goes away by late morning or early afternoon, I’m not replacing it in a hurry — but I hate the damn thing.
Yeah, we have a steel door, now, it’s okay and serviceable, but I wanted something better looking. The fiberglass doors with the wood finishes just don’t do it for me, though.
You might want to check with manufacturers of log and wood frame homes to find something that will suit you. I think you can see from this thread that expansion/contraction is a bigger problem than cracking for a well constructed wood door.